Why You Should NEVER Apply to a Position Online - The REAL Reason

All right, I'm about to tell you why you will never want to apply to a position online. In my former life, I was an internal recruiter. I led a team of recruiters where we had probably three, four, 500 resumes to go through each and every morning. Every morning we had that many resumes to go through and then we could get started with our day calling candidates and scheduling interviews, etc. So what I can tell you is we barely looked at any of those resumes. We took the fastest cuts we possibly could. We did years of experience. We did years in your current position. We did salary. We did geographic location. We took any cut we possibly could to get off the largest chunk of people. Odds are you're going to be in that chunk. That's just math.

The applicant tracking system also does its best job at approximating how good of a fit you are just by matching up keywords, but really, that doesn't even matter to us. A human will likely screen your resume, but here's why you'll never want to apply online. When we come into our inbox, we have that thing separated out so that all the resumes that come through, they go into another folder that we go through at a later date. But in our main folder, what we have are recommendations that come from coworkers, recommendations that come in from our external search partners. We want to look at those first because we trust those resources. We don't trust that you actually know what you're applying for. Harsh, but we don't.

Most of the people that apply aren't a fit for the job, so we don't trust most applications. What we trust are our trusted resources, like our coworkers, like our former coworkers, like our people that we went to school with and our external search partners that specialize in this stuff. So my biggest piece of advice to you is to never apply to a job online unless it's the absolute last thing you can do. So you get it. Don't apply online. Make sure you tap your alumni networks. Make sure you tap your former coworkers, make sure you really tap LinkedIn and use external partners (Ahem... me) if you can. That'll be your best bet to get a job.