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Dealing With Grad Spam
from the it's-an-avalanche dept
Apparently, HR directors are getting increasingly tired of grad spam - where soon to graduate college students start firing off emailed resumes to every online job posting they can find. These usually aren't targeted, and they do little to distinguish themselves from the thousands of other grad spam resumes that are showing up at the same time. In fact, many are poorly written and filled with typos (or "txt" speech). In many cases, HR folks are simply (properly) junking the resumes as spam. Sometimes, the person applying for a job didn't even bother to send the message individually, so the recipient could see the twenty other companies the applicant had fired their resume off to.
Reader Comments
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No Subject Given
It's even worse than regular spam, because many times corporate and legal regulations require archiving of just about ANY incoming solicitations for employment. Sometimes for a month, a quarter, a year, even five years. All because someone might have some claim of hiring policies or irregularities.
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No Subject Given
What's a CV?
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Re: No Subject Given
Curriculum Vitae
Everywhere-else-in-the-world-speakfor a resume.
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No Subject Given
So wait, the complaint by these HR directors is that they're being treated like cattle?
Hah.
Having seen the inside of a placement agency as an IT director, I can tell you I don't have a whole lot of pity for either these agencies, or the HR directors looking to fill jobs who throw away many applicants with anything less than ivy league pedigree.
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Re: No Subject Given
I agree with lol. I lost all respect for HR during my stint of unemployment. I was treated with contempt by nearly every HR person I met, and one HR Director called me a "liar" when she couldn't verify a part of my application (a problem at a previous employer that was corrected with a single phone call, which the HR Director was too lazy to do).
So there's no pity here.
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mentally challenged HR people
Some HR people are really clueless. I once applied for a job at a different department of the (large) organization where I worked. The job was for a much different kind of project than what I was working, but the HR person saw that the job title and pay were the same and could not understand why I was applying for my own job (to use his words).
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Boo bloody hoo!
HR people in my experience, really do not have a clue, and often don't care either.
I once went on an interview for a tech job where the agency guy told me to meat him at the pub before going for the interview. At the pub he offered me a beer (that would have smelled good at the interview!) and proceeded to tell me that last week he was an estate agent!
Personally I don't care if they get spammed with CV's, I mean isn't that their purpose?
And you'd have thought that graduates would have learned to use BCC....
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Thats thair job for christ sakes!!!
Thats thair job for christ sakes!!! If software automatically filters resumes and gives them only the suitable ones, they will loose their jobs. Lazy bums. They want to act as forwarders, lazy dumb slow forwarders!!!!
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HR *is* clueless
I'd also agree that most HR people are totally clueless. Having dealt with a few.
There's always the unreasonable expectations (like needing 10 years of windows 95 programming experience back in 96 and the like) and the total cluelessness of their questions.
The challenge had always been for me to get by them to the real people.
My current job I got because I was interviewed by my actual boss BEFORE being interviewed by HR (It was a personal reference). We had established (she had tested me at actual tasks) that I could do the job very well, but the HR person was extremely hostile from the get go (first question: How can you possibly have me believe you can fill this position since you don't have 10 years of experience with COBOL? Second question: When you saw our posting, what arrogance led you to apply? note: I had seen no official posting, I was refered by a person I had done programming contracts for who knew I could do the job). It took my boss and HER boss to step in forcefully (they were present at the interview) on my behalf to get him to back off. Considering the fact that I've been here now many years and have had nothing but success and great evaluations, I'd say they made the right choice :)
The HR person has since been downsized.
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get real
Whether HR folks are intelligent or nice is beside the point. If you think that spamming 1000 companies with a generic cover letter and resume is going to get you a job, you're likely to be disappointed.
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