For any of you who have read my past articles you might suspect that I have a slight bias away from the ongoing development of the total dependence on electronic communications as the sole means of communicating and conducting business. I have similar slight biases to bleeding from gunshot wounds and jumping out of airplanes without a parachute. This may seem funny since I am using that very medium to communicate to you. For me the medium is something more of an electronic soapbox from which I get to make my observations and suggestions, most of which are based on my non-electronic experiences. Please bear with me for a moment. I promise I’ll get to the point. It seems that that many people however have evolved to a full dependence on the internet. This was brought home to me by of all things, the evening news. The various news programs have been lauding the improvement in the economy and the relative reduction in the unemployment numbers down to approximately 8.4%. They then went on to examine some of the individuals who have been termed “long-term unemployed” or people who have been searching for work for more than 6 months. Without exception they showed images of these individuals dutifully sitting at their computers, pounding away at their emails and talking about how they have sent out “over 200 resumes” without a response. Wait a minute. Here comes the point I promised I would get to earlier. Let’s do a little Internet Math here. If job seekers are flooding the internet with 200 resumes each, it is no wonder they are not getting responses. We have seen only half the equation. How many resumes are hiring companies receiving for each job opening? The obvious answer is: Too Many. If everyone is sending out 200+ resumes that would logically mean that every job opening is receiving at least 200 applicants. This number is probably higher for certain types of positions. How can these hiring companies sort through and interview 200+ people per position? Again the obvious answer is: They Can’t. Speaking just for myself, when I was trying to fill a position I always tried to interview 4-5 people for each position, after I had the initial cuts based on just the resumes submitted. With 200+ applicants, 4-5 interviews means based purely on probability and statistics (and I will quote Mark Twain regarding statistics later) there is roughly a 2% chance that any one resume will be chosen / be the perceived perfect match for the position. Unless your resume is truly differentiated from all others (Nobel Prize laureate, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, $100 Dollar Bill attached to it – particularly difficult to do electronically, etc…), I would think that these statistics would hold true. That means that to improve your chances from 2% to 100% that you would get an interview, you would need to apply to and send resumes to 50 times more opportunities. That means that instead of sending out just 200 resumes, you would need to send out 10,000 resumes to statistically assure yourself of getting an interview. Mark Twain said “There are lies, there are damn lies…and then there are statistics.” I am pretty sure that applies here. I have tried to illustrate with a little hyperbole that sitting at your computer punching out emails, and in this case applying for positions, is not a very effective form of communication. It is not as good as making a phone call and communicating real time with a real person. It is nowhere near as good as getting up, going somewhere and meeting someone face to face to have a conversation. Sitting behind the computer may be more efficient, in that the costs expended in communicating are much lower (how much do bit cost?), and the number of people that you can theoretically contact is much higher (how many friends on Facebook, or connections on LinkedIn?), but as the numbers show, it is nowhere near as effective as the old school methods of actually meeting people and talking to people. In today’s day and age it is indeed the fortunate few who have not had to look for a new position. Some of us have had to do it multiple times. All of my successes in this area have come as a result of making personal contact with someone. I would like to think that I am reasonably well educated and experienced, but I also recognize that there are a lot of other well educated and experienced people out there. While a resume might be able to provide some insights into an individual’s potential job qualifications, the only person that can differentiate me for everyone else, is me. The only way I or anyone else can provide that differentiation from everyone else is to get off the internet, and get out and make real time contact with people. Otherwise, you are relying on some pretty long odds and statistics.
