Sorry, I don’t actually have 50 ways to piss off an HR Pro.
Well, let me take that back.
I could easily come up with 50 ways to piss off an HR Pro, but you don’t pay me to do this and that would be a lot of work (well, probably not that much work, but you still don’t pay me).
I do have one major way to piss off an HR Pro, but I liked the title from Paul Simon’s old song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover:
The Wall Street Journal had a pretty cool article this week (The Unemployed Worker’s New Friend: Outsourcers) which dives into a relatively new industry of offshore companies that are mass sending a person’s resume to as many job openings as possible for a very minimal investment. Now don’t get me wrong; resume services have been around for a long time, but add outsourcing and some language barriers to the mix, and what you get is a recipe for a bunch of unqualified resumes coming across your desk.
From the article:
For a $10 monthly fee ($40 for the first month) an automated service called MyJobHunter.com sent out more than 500 job applications in five months on (Mel) Moomjean’s behalf. Within a day after a job opening hit the Web, the service scanned it for certain keywords. In Mr. Moomjean’s case, the words included “sales” and “retail.” If the listing was a match, the service would fire off a résumé to the employer without so much as showing it to the applicant…
In a span of 240 hours over three months last summer, JobSerf’s staff applied to 711 jobs on behalf of IT manager Colin Campbell, 34, of Cincinnati. Mr. Campbell said he got dozens of calls from potential employers. But he didn’t get his current job that way; he got it through a personal connection.
On a single day last summer, Greg Moffitt, 47, of Houston, sent out more than 100 applications via MyJobHunter. An irritated recruiter, who got his résumé three times, eventually called to ask him to stop.
“I knew that 20 percent of positions were a complete miss, but I’d rather have too many submissions than too few,” Mr. Moffitt said.”
So, here’s the No. 1 way to piss off an HR Pro – send them a resume for a position that you are not remotely qualified for!
Look, I get it. When you’re out of work, sending out 500 resumes to any job seems like the right thing to do – and what the heck – if I can get a 9 year-old in China to do it for $4 a day, well, that’s just the good old lazy American way!
But it’s not. There aren’t easy ways out in finding the “right” job. Sure a resume service will find you some opportunities, but mass sending resumes isn’t going to find you that perfect fit. You need to put in the research and make the calls and tap your inner circle of contacts.
Plus, I truly believe there is some value that you gain from the sweat equity of looking for a job, and sending out those 500 resumes on your own. You gain some empathy, some respect, and some appreciation – for which many of us take for granted – in Being Employed!
So, do it yourself. You don’t have a job, so you have 24 hours a day you can spend in looking for one. You don’t have a paycheck, so even $10 per month is probably too much to spend on something you can do yourself.
Plus, you won’t piss me off when I get your resume sent to me from a bot in India for my sales position when you haven’t sold anything since that lemonade stand you had when you were 8 – and even then, only your mom bought from you.
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.
