The rule of the day relates to how companies acknowledge that they have received your resume. “We’ll keep your resume on file” (or words to that effect) is something that you tend to hear from an employer immediately after emailing your resume to them or sending your profile to them using their online application process.
Exactly what this means to you is another story.
In the old days before the Internet, it wasn’t uncommon to mail your resume to a company and two weeks later get a postcard or letter mailed back acknowledging that your resume had been received.
As email, instant messages and the like took over and began to replace actual hard copy correspondence – and as it became easier and cheaper for us to fire off hundreds of resumes by email rather than by mail – it became more difficult for companies to treat each submission individually.
So auto responder emails were created that would automatically trigger a generic response to the generally generic job submissions that many people send to various hiring managers around the world.
“We’ll keep your resume on file” is a polite way of saying that the recipient hasn’t yet gotten to reading your email given the hundreds or thousands of other emails that they have received for the same job you applied for and they don’t guarantee that they’ll actually get to reading your resume anytime in the near future.
Instead they will put it in their database for a period not to exceed 3, 6, 9 or 12 months or whatever their policy is and if you’re lucky, one of their HR reps might conduct a keyword search during that time that causes your resume to pop up on their screen most likely with hundreds or thousands of other candidates, too.
Bottom line, once your resume hits the company’s database, it’s sitting there with upwards of hundreds of thousands of other resumes and whether or not it gets read at a time when you’re actually looking for a new job or are in a position to consider one, is debatable.
