If a resume falls in the forest, does anyone read it?

As we’ve already discussed, many people these days consider a “job search” to be a matter of firing off dozens of resumes in response to jobs that they’ve seen online on various job boards. The issue of course is that it’s just as easy for everyone else to do the same thing so ultimately, the hiring manager receiving these emails might simply choose to ignore the (possibly) hundreds of submissions they get and look for a more effective way to hire someone.

In other words, if you email your resume to someone, does someone actually read it?

With spam filters these days, they might not even receive it.

In the old days – that would be up to the early to late 1990s – it wasn’t uncommon to mail or fax your resume to a hiring manager and then receive a letter in the mail several weeks later in response to acknowledge that they’d received your application!

You’d actually get a written response and not an automatic form email as is common these days. It felt like you were actually dealing with a human being at the other end.

It didn’t mean you were getting the job or even an interview but it did somehow feel you had made some progress. Now of course, it takes far less time and effort to email a resume than it did to print out, address, stamp and then mail a resume to the same person.

Of course, this also means that you may not have to worry about all the stuff we used to worry about when mailing a resume:

  • Should I use colored or white paper?
  • Should I use heavy stock paper or can I use the cheaper stuff?
  • Should I hand write or type the address on the envelope?
  • Should I include a cover letter?

These days, things tend to be spelled out a bit more than before. Jobs that you view online often tell you exactly what you need to apply for the job and many companies utilize online systems that enable them to decide what they want from you ie. Resume? Cover letter? Written answers to certain questions?

In that regard, when applying for jobs, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions you are given and give them what they’re asking for. Even if they don’t specifically ask for a cover letter, you can include one to not only give them a sample of your writing but more importantly to illustrate things not evident in your resume that show the reader why you are someone they need to interview. As a recruiter, I often speed read cover letters just to see what’s in there and to check the spelling, grammar, etc which can give me an idea as to the type of person I’m dealing with.

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