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« Changes to I/O Licensing in California | Main | Selection Humor »
New Rules for Internet Applicants
On February 7, 2006 by Jamie Madigan
Yesterday, February 6th, was the day that Federal regulations helping define an "applicant" in the context of the Internet went into effect. I wrote about this already and there's an excellent summary right here, but this article on CNN Money entitled "Job hunting online gets trickier" caught my eye.
First, the headline is kind of misleading. I don't think that a whole lot has changed about the way that people are going to be job hunting based on these new regulations. The approaches that worked the best on February 5th are still going to work as well today. The author of the CNN piece, however, seems to disagree, mainly fixating on the "possesses the basic objective qualifications for the position" part of the wording. To quote the CNN article:
For instance, if a job description includes the words "three years of credit accounting experience," put "three years of credit accounting experience" on your resume. "Don't just list a credit-accounting position with the dates you had it and assume someone will figure it out," Crispin advises. This may mean you have to rewrite your resume for each job opening you apply for.
What? No, not if you ask me. I doubt recruiters will slash their applicant pools to ribbons just because nobody parroted the job description in their applications. Targeting your resume to a particular job is always smart, but any reasonable recruiter or hiring manager could look at your 4 years of experience in credit-accounting and justify their decision to interview you.
Here's another head scratcher:
The rules allow companies to pick a random pool of applicants by searching the job boards for 'most recent' qualified applicants," Crispin notes. "In those cases, no one will even look at a resume that is more than two or three weeks old." Yikes.
Yikes? The CNN article doesn't provide any references, I guess they're referring to this file which says that employers can use random sampling to deal with an overwhelmingly large applicant pool. But I'm not sure how that's different than it was before the new rules. Companies could always pick random samples of applications, though they'd be unwise to do so in all but the biggest applicant pools without at least some preliminary screening.
At any rate, odd article. It almost felt like the author just wanted to throw something out there to not the occasion and just reported everything some consultant told her. It also has a rather bombastic headline, all things considered.
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