Once upon a time in a little town in bucolic New England, I was a member of the School Board. (You ask…What does this have to do with job hunting?) It provides my claim to knowing at least a little about what the other side of this process looks like.
In this long, long ago world there were no computer job searches. To post a job, you put an ad in the appropriate newspaper or magazine and maybe some other places and waited for the mail to come rolling in. In time, you stopped the ad and started looking at the pile of resumes and cover letters.
The goal was the same as it is today – getting a short list of the candidates with the best match.
In those bygone days without the benefits of a keyword, what did you do? For a school superintendent you took the pile (neatly stacked and organized by the Board’s secretary) and started through. First step: Doctorate or No Doctorate? Doctorates -> continue pile; No doctorate -> out. Next step: Superintendent experience? Continue vs. Wastebasket. And so on and so forth until you had a stack where it was reasonable to start reading the cover letters and resumes.
I have no reason to believe that the goal has not changed. Here is my question – is today’s computer aided process really effective and efficient in producing this short list?
This question is always in the back of my mind as I explore the job boards. I do admit to having a prejudice in thinking that maybe the process is not what it ought to be.
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