Have you been slaving over a hot new CV?

I have been fascinated by the fact that in recent editions of "The Canberra Times" there are so many jobs available, especially in the Australian Public Service. I read information which details the operation of the current policies that enable people in different government agencies to obtain varying levels of remuneration for doing virtually the same kind of work and at the same level of classification.

This information would suggest that there is a new and interesting internal current of migration among departments and agencies of government as even semi intelligent operators realise that in order to milk the system to its fullest extent, you have to be highly mobile and continually spend (no doubt) hours of your employer's time scanning the newspapers, the Internet, the Gazette and anywhere else you can find information about the jobs that are going so as to maximise your opportunities. This of course does have one drawback.

Those who are even less intelligent than you are (or more dedicated - something that seems to amount to the same thing) are left to do most of the work. These poor fools actually work 10 or 12 hour days as they try to cope with the deluge of work while their 'colleagues" spend their time seeking ways out of their current situation and into one that pays more and offers even more time to plan the next set of steps to ever higher remuneration and conditions.

As a team of people in the APS is required by the pressures of the 'do more with less' philosophy, to work all of its members as fully as possible each working day there is going to be a natural form of attrition that takes place. This will most likely take the form of people who fall ill or are simply unable to cope with the stress. The results of this will of course be people who are unavailable to undertake the work that is urgently required and so force the remaining staff to come up with some solutions that fill the "need" gap.

One immediate solution is of course to hire some temporary or contract staff. These are people who sell their services to the highest bidder. Some of these actually do have skills and experience aplenty. However how can you tell? Another solution is to spend around one annual salary per job vacancy trying to hire someone who is a permanent staff member. Once again you will still have to undertake the recruitment process and use a CV that together with the person's application will enable you as part of a selection panel to select the best candidate or will it?

A recent set of information from the USA "Overload driving resumes to extinction" makes it clear that relying on this form of information is fraught with dangers. As reported by Nic Paton in "Management Issues" it states:

"A study by recruitment firm MRINetwork has found that, despite candidate shortages and the impending retirement of large numbers of baby boomers, the resume is no longer an effective tool for employers seeking to fill critical positions within their companies.

Human resources managers and recruiters are getting more resumes than ever before, but a significant percentage of them, often as high as a third to a half, are never reviewed.

"Like fast food, the resume deluge is fat and bloated," said Kent Burns, a partner at MRINetwork.

"Resumes are generally of poor quality and of declining interest to those interested in a healthier, leaner way of operating," he added.

Candidate awareness of employment opportunities, often through the internet, had led to the marked increase in resume submissions.

Before the job board era, passive candidates did not have easy access to the universe of job openings.

"Now candidates search openings via job boards 24 hours a day, 365 days a years," said Burns.

"With resume submission only a mouse click away, they often apply to multiple positions. It's not uncommon for me to contact candidates who confess to applying to so many job postings that they haven't a clue which one I'm calling about," he complained.

Compounding the problem with job boards was the lack of standardisation, which created a challenge with classification, storage, retrieval and comparability.

Employers have found that having hundreds of disparate resumes and a text search function is only marginally better than having hundreds of paper resumes.

"The lack of meaningful filters creates inconsistency and even chaos– while draining important HR resources," worried Burns.

There was also an inherent risk in relying too heavily on the resume as an indicator of talent and ability.

"Errors, exaggerations and even lies are all part of the resume landscape," said Burns.

"These tactics transfer the burden of validation to the company's interviewing process, and often the inaccuracies go undetected until the new hire is on the job and problems begin to surface," he added."

I have no idea what others can and do read from this information, but I manage to get the following:

• If you want to have a job - now is the time to get one.
  
• Buy a computer, connect to the internet, find all of the locations where jobs are advertised, and set up a search that selects all of the job ads that happen to meet your expectations for work conditions and at the same time match those with whatever claims you have to any experience and/or expertise.
• Get on to web sites that present templates for resumes and fill one in - any one will do. Hang on to this as your base document to which you can cut and paste relevant new information as it becomes available and of course adjust the text minimally to suit the job ad that you are responding to.
• Unlike the idiots that send out so many resumes that they cannot remember who they sent what to - try and ensure that you use the computer to keep a meticulous record of who you sent what to by using either a data base or at least a spreadsheet.
• In a spreadsheet for example, you can list in various columns all of the information about any given job and using hyperlinks actually have a direct link to the resume and the application you have submitted for that particular job. So that when someone calls you about a job you can immediately flick to the relevant line in the spreadsheet and pull up your application and your CV so that both you and the person calling are on the same page.
  
• If you want to do as little as possible for the most pay - now is the time to get a job. With the increasing number of people who seem to flit from job to job there is always an opportunity to find at least one job near your home that meets your basic requirements for the next step up the ladder of success. However do it now as this 'window of opportunity is likely to close as more and more people try and subvert the system and as the resistance to this becomes better coordinated and more discriminating. At present it costs around a year's salary to initiate a job advertisement and undertake the entire selection process for each new employee. This cost is made up not only of the costs of advertising and recruitmentnt, but also in the time taken by existing employees who have to read the dross that comes in the form of applications and resumes and then spend their time making a selection and of course training the new person to fit in to the organisation and actually be able to undertake the work for which he or she has been hired.
  
• If you want to maximise your opportunities - fill in as many resumes as possible and send them to the poor slobs that have the task of reading and vetting them and hope like crazy that you will be among those people whose jottings they have read and whose successful strategy of getting an interview will meet with a group of people who will take a punt on virtually anyone so that they can actually get their job filled and so hopefully reduce the amount of work that is being taken up by the recruitement process.
• If of course you do not succeed with one resume or one application don't fret - there are hundred more jobs out there you are responding to and if you have been following this strategy there are hundreds more of your applications that others are responding to.
  

With the desperation born of necessity those who are seeking employees may actually be desperate enough to select YOU - the chance is just one more application and resume away!