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Your office may not be of the "cluless" variety. Unfortunately I have dealt with a lot of "clueless" recruiters. I've also gone through preliminary interviews where I have been asked if I know Adobe. (for example) The Adobe product line has a huge variety of software, and I find I have to do some fishing to figure out what she/he is asking for. Page makeup, image editing, illustration, help authoring, screen capture, pdf, web-based training, website building--all types of software that Adobe manufactures. That is an example of candidates being screened by someone who has very little knowledge of the skillset needed for a job. They are just filling out a checklist.
With the prevalence of web resume submission, resumes get scanned or dumped into a database and searched via key word. Depending on the system, and the key words used in the search, an excellent candidate can be skipped over. I've seen this happen in the company I work for, we've had great candidates who managed to get past HR to get their resume to the hiring manager. I've also experienced submitting resumes via the proper channels with no results. When I network my way into the target company, or manage to connect to the appropriate manager by phone, I find my resume seemed to go into some sort of black hole of web submitted resumes.
The recruitment landscape has changed dramatically for those of us seeking jobs. It has become a real art to figure out how to get past the gatekeepers. When you get to interview with someone who knows the skills needed for the job it is great, but I have found that it doesn't happen until after a couple phone interviews.
Now I have several versions of resumes. One for a scanned resume, a plain text file for uploads, one which I check carefully for key words, a .PDF version, and a web-based portfolio.
Joanne
Jill Marie Jeffries <jjeffri1 -at- gmu -dot- edu> wrote:
I work as a recruiter for a large Government Contractor. We get a job description directly from our customer and post the positions based on what they are looking for. Typically we are not "clueless" as to the skills that the customer is looking for. Most of the candidates that we talk to at my company don't have the skills we are looking for listed on their resume, so we have to dig deeper to find out what they have used, and what they have not used. I have not hear of recruiters getting a list of preferred software packages and writing up job descriptions based on that.
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