The Good and Bad of On-line Resumes

In this day and age, technology and the internet are slowly replacing the need for hard-copy resumes. Statistics clearly show that employers prefer to have resumes sent to them on-line. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conducted a survey. The results showed that “47.8 percent prefer to have resumes submitted electronically through their websites, while another 42.1 percent favor receiving resumes via e-mail. Just 8.2 percent of the respondents prefer to receive hard copies of resumes, while 1.9 percent like to receive resumes by other means.”

Employers see the positives behind electronically submitted resumes to be mainly in the convenience. The on-line method prevents lost papers and easily allows employers to organize these electronic resumes in a database. For many, finding the right candidate may be as easy as entering a few key words to pull up an applicant with a specific list of skill sets. Although this method has become increasingly popular, there is no denying that it blocks out a once more personal, face to face approach to recruiting employees. Applying online for a job is much too impersonal for some applicants and others lack the patience and trust to deal with it at all. NACE further states: “College students have less regard for widely used electronic tools than recruitment professionals might believe.”
In addition, providing an option for online application prevents any necessary initial screening process. A recruiter or employer risks having hundreds, if not thousands of resumes and applications to sort through. The result is an increase in the already pricey cost of an online job posting due to the amount of time spent in filtering through the sea of resumes. Desperate for jobs in this economy, it is likely that more and more applicants will take their chances, in applying for a job, for which they do not qualify. The listed years of experience required may be ignored. Worse yet, in their desperation, applicants may ‘dress-up’ their resumes and claim to have skill-sets, such as computer knowledge, that they know little or nothing about.

Top Recruiter, Tom Mayrant of CPS has stated: “The more people we have looking for work, the more I realize how bogged down employers must be with on-line job postings. I can’t even imagine having to filter through all of those potentially falsified resumes.” Having met with and dealt with many applicants in his years of experience, Tom Mayrant expressed his concern for the Human Resource Manager: “I have seen more fake IDs, false Social Security cards and jazzed up resumes than I would like to admit.” Unfortunately, in desperate times, people will do whatever it takes to find work., It takes a sharp eye and years of experience to know how to keep from being fooled by such applicants.