How To Solve the "No One Calls Me" Problem

by Randall Scasny, Director, FS5 Consulting Business Card

The universal problem of online job board users.


Nearly all my customers have this complaint and here's how they describe it:

I post my resume online and apply for jobs I'm qualified for. But no one calls me. I've been doing this for months. Can you help me?

Yes, I can.

This problem is caused by any combination of the following:

1. Lack of a detailed, targeted Resume

2. Improperly integrated Resume

3. Low Job Demand / High Talent Availability

4. Lack of Job Title Correspondence

5. No Photo

Let me go through them.

Inadequate Resume: most of the resume writing books sold in book stores are wrong. They give these nice, 1-page, "professional" resume samples that do not work well online. Why? These 1-page wonders are for the pre-Internet age when resumes were read by a human being, not searched via keywords in a database. To succeed in the online world, you need a intrinsic online resume. This type of resume is lite on looks, but deep on career information. It is targeted. It contains plenty of "possible" employer search keywords. But there's one cautionary note about keywords: keyword stuffing does not improve your chances of getting a call back. Why? Keywords are career-level weighted. This means if you place keywords that are typical of an early-career professional (lots of software skills) on a senior manager resume, these keywords will pull down your visibility because you are crossing career levels.

Poor Resume Database Visibility: once you have a detailed resume, now you need to post it online by either uploading the resume or building it with the database field forms. Building the resume makes it more searchable (visible). Uploading gets poor to mixed reviews. The three most important things in integrating your resume properly are industry sectors, job title and name of resume. If you are posting it to the wrong sector, it may not be seen. If your job title is not the title the employers use, you will get lower ranking than those people who do. And, if you name your resume, "Mary's resume," you are not meaningfully describing what is inside your resume. Employers will pass you by.

Low Job Demand: no matter how good your resume is, there has to be a good enough job demand to draw in plenty of recruiters to search through the database. If you have been downsized and your industry is not growing, this could be the reason why no one is looking at you. If your industry being downsized what also could be happening is the skills you acquired in that dying industry could be outdated or stagnant. In other words,it's time to go back to school or get a certification.

Lack of Job Title Correspondence: Recruiters search by skill-keywords and the job title. If your job titles do not correspond to the job they want to fill, you might not come up in their searches and never be called.

No Photo: Job Boards and Social-Media-Job-Boards can hold a photo in the candidate profiles. Many recruiters won't contact you without a photo. Sure, it sounds discriminatory but that's human nature.