We will keep your resume on file for 6 months. Or longer.
When you email your resume to a major company and they inevitably don’t have a job that matches your skills and experience, you will probably get an automated email response that tells you that they will keep your resume on file for a period of 6 months. You hope that this means they are keeping a copy of your resume in case a suitable position arises. Afterall, that’s what they told you.
In actuality, they are keeping your resume on file so that when a recruiter sends them your resume for a particular job – hopefully with your permission – the HR staff can tell the recruiter that they already have your resume in their database and therefore won’t require the recruiter’s help. This means they won’t have to pay the recruiter but can still follow up with you for the job you applied for.
This is good for the company because they just got a recruiter to do their job for them and they didn’t even have to pay for the recruiter’s work. It also causes the recruiter to curse the resume Gods for ever creating online job boards.
The bad news is that the company may not actually contact you for the job because contacting you would be an admission that the HR staff in charge of searching the resume database don’t know what they are doing and chances are, they don’t. Or they’ll assume that since you are already in the company’s database and haven’t been hired, you must not be that good otherwise another HR staffer in the company would have interviewed you already.
Now, if you aren’t actually using a recruiter and have already submitted your resume to a company, don’t expect that a member of the HR staff will contact you regarding a suitable position because it would assume that the people who work in HR for that company know how to use a resume database.
They probably don’t.
If they did, all recruiters would be unemployed.
The good news is that in 6 months, your resume will be deleted and you can start the game all over again and resubmit your resume to the company for consideration. Or maybe your resume won’t be deleted because the 6 month thing is just something the company tells you to stop you from calling them over and over again asking about the status of your application and figures that after 6 months of not hearing from them, you’ll get the point.
The person who designed the resume database may have forgotten to actually write code to delete resumes after 6 months, too. Oops.
