How Online Job Boards Can Actually Help A Job Search

The "black hole" concept is so true. However, the level of pickiness from companies is even more unbelievable. I remember much like some here when you would post your resume of a site like Monster and get contacted shortly thereafter. Today however, even applying directly through a company's career page yields no responses for the most part. Even now phone interviews have come back as preliminary screening process. Unfortunately sometimes once you have spoken to them about their openings, that same person that was so easy to contact to schedule the phone interview, has now become a on-going call to the person's answering machine. You leave a message but no one calls back even though you're often told to call back if you don't hear back within a specified time frame. I've called back like a collector would call multiple times to see if maybe I can reach the person I spoke to. Of course never leaving multiple messages. As for why I think they're a bit picky, I finished a phone interview that went well until the person told me that although I had say 8 of 10 bullet points, it was those two that disqualified me from further consideration. What got to me more as I tried to stay calm and not "burn any bridges" was that these two specific points were nowhere in the resume that the person used to contact me. In fact, the interview was over before being scheduled and providing a false hope of being able to get out of this miserable situation. Obviously I'm no corporate recruiter but is it me (please forgive the sports analogy) or are these company's acting like NBA teams that are hoping that after dumping all their salaries in lay-offs, they can now find their next All-Star in the unemployed ranks? Speaking for myself I say you're more likely to find a lot more team players to develop for every LeBron out there plus the likelihood of these companies having laid off these "10 bullet point" ,"specialized industry experience" personnel is quite unlikely. To further underscore the feeling of underachievement" in this resume process is the fact that companies containing positions that fall under the "underemployed" category will often hire those candidated that are more less likely to leave when the job market starts to turn (many seem to think it'll happen the day after your potential hiring date) as they fear that "corporate" candidates are not worth the risk in training and so these jobs have now become as hard to get as the one you were let go from. So while you do your part to re-join the work force, others with the power to assist in this situation have become more reluctant. I miss the days when 80-90% match between your resume and job description was enough to get you in. I just wish that in a country by the people and for the people, we weren't required to have our names on buildings to be heard and helped out as many of us were let go just before the multiple extensions were passed and will soon have nothing left to build a future on. As for the tips in the article, I've tried them all..revising the old resume(done), calling back(often get answering machines but no responses), plus some of the other advice seems a bit common from what I've read on other sites. For as long as companies feel that the 100% match person is out there, it seems that they will rule out everyone else until such a person is found and need be re-post the same position months on end. I hope that all of us here will soon start earning a living soon once again because for as much as the so-called unemployment rate skews the results by not counting those of us who gave up...we will continue to be just that...a missing stat.