Guest Post By Ben Johnson
“We will keep your resume on file”
Anyone who has ever applied to a job has heard this phrase. Whoever came up with this should have patented it because its usage by the HR world has become an epidemic.
As you may already know, when you apply to a job, and get turned down, they tell you that your resume will be kept “on file.” Allow me to go ahead and enlighten you on what “on file” means. Your resume will sit in an email inbox for a few days until it is deleted to make room for the hundreds of more resumes that are coming in daily. Never have I received a call a few months later saying “Oh hey, we have this great opportunity now, and we saw your resume on file. Are you interested!?” In your dreams!
So why do they say it? It’s simple. It’s because the current HR world is an inefficient machine. They have one big formula for how they function, and it puts them and job seekers at a loss.
The job process needs to be humanized again. We should go ahead and do away with the myriad of “careers” pages and job search engines. They are the biggest waste of time since rocking chairs. I will applaud the first company who’s career simply reads, “If it’s meant to be, you’ll find a way.” That’s all! Nothing else. That would mean that if you were truly interested, you would use your brain to search for a friend of a friend of a friend who works there to set up a meeting. That is genius. That would eliminate the brain-dead process we have now, and single out the job seekers who are truly motivated and qualified. That would dissolve the universal, mundane HR language and give meaning to the term “on file.”
