On average, how many cover letters and resumes are you sending out per day, per week, or per month?
Can’t answer that - but I would offer you this right now - pretty disturbing in my view (I have ducked several large layoffs and am waiting until they find me, so I am watching employment trends)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/04/disturbing-job-ads-the-un_n_600665.html#
An old friend of mine who worked in HR said the average was 200 resumes = 1 callback - that was a few years ago, so things may have changed.
what is your profession???
.
I feel badly for you, but would honestly suggest creating your own income stream.
Anything.
“We do get a lot of applications blindly from people who are currently unemployed – with the economy being what it is, we’ve had a lot of people contact us that don’t have the skill sets we want, so we try to minimize the amount of time we spent on that and try to rifle-shoot the folks we’re interested in.”
I think this is the key reason behind those policies. I have many recruiter friends who, ironically, spend happy hours lamenting the fact that they can’t find enough good people for the positions they have to fill. In some cases, it’s due to the bona fide job requirements (ie. test engineer, etc.) where the fishing hole is pretty small. In other cases, they are simply mail-bombed for any posted position. The stories are atrocious: absolutely no qualifications, poor grammer, spelling errors on résumés / cover letters (nothing spells 110 file like claiming an ‘attention to detail’ and then spelling a word wrong, etc.) and poor judgement (email addresses like ‘pussycat6696@somehost.com’, etc.)
As a result, 2 things have happened. 1- recruiters have turned to automated tools to search for key-words. This makes customizing your résumé for each role crucial. 2- they’re also using gate-keepers: inexperienced, young people - often interns - to triage. The problem with this is that often, due to lack of experience, they are very black/white. It says ‘5 yrs experience’ and you only have ‘4’? 110ed.
The majority of opportunities are not posted, and can be accessed only through networking. The shotgun approach to blanket résumé sending can actually harm your search, IMO. I believe that it should be one of the final steps, and not the absolute very first. But then again, I’m contrarian and have been rallying for change in HR policies my entire career…
Being unintentinally unemployed sucks. But in response to that article, would you really want to work for a company that had poaching and elitism as its recruiting policy?
In my first year of my first job I happened to be in the HR office when the screener for summer scheme applicants complained to a nearby partner that they were getting overwhelmed by the number of resumes received. He walked in, picked up the top 2/3 of the pile, dumped them in the bin and stalked off down the corridor shouting “I don’t want unlucky people working for me.”
Irrelevant anecdote I know but I always think of him when people talk about sending out resumees. To answer your question about 6/8 a week. I’m intentionally unemplyed but still dipping a toe when something looks like a good fit. Bite rate has been extremely low (like hearing back from 5-10% and making any progress at all with 1-2%).
The response rate that I had heard was on the order of 3%. In this economy, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was down to 0.5%. Keping that in mind, you should have some targets to shoot for…like at least 400 resumes. That’s 25 a week over 4 months, which is very doable.
I learned a few things from marketing my band that I think translate well in job hunting:
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Target audience
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Volume
When job hunting I bassicaly targeted a handful of companies directly in the industry that I was qualified for. Since I did defense work, I put my resumes in at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, the government, and a handful of contractors that worked for the government. Each of those applications took hours to fill out, but I thought it was worthwhile.
Beyond that, I sent my resume out everywhere and learned quickly not to waste my time with companies that required a similar application process. For every company that required a crazy application, there were 20 - 30 that I could have sent my resume to.
I found career builder to be very effective in that manner. They had a list of companies that you could check and it would submit your standard resume straight to them. It would then send you a list of related opportunities, of which I would check all that didn’t require an application to be filled out.
I’m not sure I hit the 400 mark, but I did send out at least a couple 100. I ended up with 2 interviews and 1 job offer…interestingly the job was at a company that my friend works at and he forwarded the job listing. Having said that, I still get calls from recruiters.