Assume you are the CEO, president, or owner of a company and you have the responsibility and authority to make decisions. Some of them can be delegated but the ultimate responsibility is yours. Your company has an executive management position to fill. In the Human Resource department of your company you have a person working for you with the responsibility for selection and placement of personnel. They have posted the position opening on an on-line job board. In this economy with its extreme unemployment rate, especially in the management ranks, that someone is now buried.
While they have merit and arguable utilitarian value, the number of job boards has
increased dramatically since Monster appeared. That cute name brand has been copiously copied since 1999. Just like everything else that started on the Internet as a free service, many job boards, such as Ladders, are fee based — not free. For fees that range from low monthly rates to high single pay prices, the boards sell their customers résumé writing services to rewrite a job seeker’s copy, changing language that a person might read into language that a computer program reads.
Your responsible Human Resources person has received a plethora of applications and cover letters in response to the job posted on the job boards on your company’s behalf. You likely have some bright person in charge of the application screening process and they may be using some flavor of HR software to scan résumés and cover letters for key words and key phrases that display the highest probability of matching the criteria of the job description. The software helps HR people automate the selection process.
Job seekers know this and many spend money to have job board companies apply their résumé writers with their proprietary HR adapted software to make sure that the processed résumés that your person receives have the highest probability of making the probability cut. The software helps the job board people make résumés and cover letters more acceptable to an automated process. Think of it like homogenization. An odd word choice, perhaps, but forensically it’s true. Both postings and résumés become exercises in cliché as a result.
Article comments
1 - William Waite
This is a well-reasoned analysis of where the HR function is these days, Tommy. In the long run, I question whether software and job-posting platforms that effectively recast the candidate into someone he or she may not be can properly match people to positions. On another level, perhaps this is a contributing factor to why so many have simply stopped looking for traditional employment. If the (fully-employed) government number-crunchers still counted the unemployed the way they used to, the resulting statistic would more accurately reflect the misery that defines where so many are in this country today.
2 - Jane Clements
Agreed - it's kind of automating the process and therefore taking the individuality and personality out of CV's
thanks,
Jane