Tuesday 17 September 2013

Hacking the application process - A cheat mode for Developers

In a previous post I talked about resumes from candidates that applied direct being seen as secondary to those candidates who were sourced by internal recruiters.  In some organisations recruiters will go out of their way to extol the virtues of a candidate to a hiring manager simply because they were hard to find or it took a long time to tease a CV out of the candidate.  All this is at the cost of a potentially more suitable, talented CV that is sat in an applicant tracking system, dusty and unloved.

How can you get that in-house recruiter who seems to be ignoring you to advocate for you in the same way?  How can you be sure that your resume is presented in the same way, in that flurry of excitement?

You can't.  Sorry.  There are hundreds of reasons that the recruiter hasn't go back to you, none of them good enough to warrant ignoring you.

This is of course understandably bad news, but there is a way around this and perhaps it will give you a better insight into the company culture and the role you are applying for.  First step research the company you want to apply for on LinkedIn.  In the same way a  recruiter would find your profile on LinkedIn, look for someone who would be a peer or a manager of a team you'd like to join.  Contact them and ask them about their role, ask them all the questions that you didn't get the answers to by reading the job description.  Mention that you'd like to apply, ask the person you're in contact with to look over your CV.
Ideally the short cut you are taking is to game the internal referral process of your chosen target company and have an existing employee advocate for you.  The pressure you are really exploiting here is the perceived imbalance of power between the HR department and "the business".  The cachet that is attached to a CV that is referred is often enough to force the attention of recruiters as there is a pressure to be answerable to the employee who handed the CV to them, in short the process will be expedited.  Doing this won't increase your skills or suitability for the job but it will mean you are at least seen and considered, not left to languish in an inbox.

For recruiters who feel I may be doing them a disservice in encouraging this sort of behaviour I'd offer a little by way of explanation.  Build relationships with your hiring managers, communicate with them effectively and you'll find they are by far the best arbiters of prospective candidates - and ultimately they are on your side.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Exactly what I encourage job seekers to do and why not? Great post Matt.