reCareered: Are You Buying the Mac & Cheese of Job Search?
Article Submitted by:
Phil Rosenberg
So much of today’s job search advice is like Mac & Cheese. It’s comfort food. It’s not very good for you, but it’s comfortable…it makes you feel good.
Like Mac & Cheese, this advice is very popular – you see it everywhere. Just as Mac & Cheese isn’t an efficient food source, this advice won’t make your job search efficient. But it WILL make you feel good, like you’re doing the right thing, because you see this advice everywhere.
So how can you tell what advice is Mac & Cheese? Examples of job search comfort food are cover letters. Think of how many articles you see, and how much advice a candidate receives about how to write a perfect cover letter. It’s comfortable advice that we’ve heard since we were originally taught to type them…on typewriters.
But cover letters just don’t work today. At best, cover letters are an obsolete tradition. But cover letters can work against a candidate, providing much more of a disadvantage over any potential advantage.
Here’s why cover letters are like Mac & Cheese:
1) Hiring Managers usually don’t get cover letters. I talk to 60 executives per month, and each one tells me how they hire candidates. About 75% of the time, hiring managers tell me they don’t even get cover letters from HR departments or recruiters. Recruiters and HR departments often don’t see cover letters, even though they are asked for within the ads they place.
2) Hiring Managers only see about a dozen resumes per position, out of thousands of applicants. HR departments and recruiters use databases to pre-screen resumes. These systems, called Applicant Tracking Systems, search resumes by keywords, allowing the HR screener or recruiter to pick the resumes that best match the keywords being searched…just like we do every day on Google. Most Applicant Tracking Systems don’t keyword search cover letters, only resumes.
Most candidates sent the same static resume to the jobs they apply to, hoping that the words in their resume happen to magically match the words being searched for. The odds are lousy.
3) It’s a published statistic that most hiring managers make an interview/non interview decision in an average 15 seconds. In 15 seconds you can’t read both a resume and cover letter. Which do you think most hiring managers read first?
I’m running a poll currently on Linkedin, asking hiring managers which they read first…75% read the resume first. Anecdotal evidence I hear each month puts that percentage at 90% who read the resume first.
I’m currently running another poll on Linkedin, asking candidates if they send a cover letter, or include a customized resume…over 85% send a cover letter and most customize the cover letter. Just 6% send a customized resume.
Isn’t that gap eye opening? 85% put their customization into a document that’s rarely seen.
