HR Are You Out There

Weekly re-cap: I worked for a company out of Denver for several years. We went through transition after transition after transition. The last president for whom I worked told us something at a national meeting that has stuck with me all these years, “what have I done to make money today”. I can take that to a different realm while I am searching for a job and say, “what I have done to search for a job today?”

Well, on Wednesday, I received a direct mail from Sunquest Information Systems. They found my resume on Career Builders. So, like a good little job searcher, I applied for a field position for a Clinical Product Specialist. I was actually pretty excited to complete the on-line application (for the first time in a long time). I didn’t even need to take a deep breath before I got started, I just started! I like the fact that I could list my own “key search words” for the system to pull. The recruitment site was very user friendly. I liked being able to add my own comments to strengthen my position. I used my new resume so lets see what it pulls.

Many of these recruitment sites are so frustrating….the worst site that I have encountered thus far is Tri-Health in Cincinnati, Ohio. Tri-Health makes you jump through so many hoops, is not user friendly and there is no way for an applicant to “personalize” their inquiry. I have tried four times now to apply at Tri-Health without success. I am either booted out of the site or I just get frustrated and give up. I probably won’t attempt to re-apply at Tri-Health.

So my goal was five applications this week using my new resume. Along with Sunquest and my attempt at Tri-Health I have applied for two positions at Hillenbrand Industries and have applied for about the umpteenth time! They apparently have a recruiting firm that screens all of the applications. I will probably never get to the appropriate HR person but I keep applying hoping that at some point someone will see my resume for the millionth time and say, “hey, why do we keep seeing this crazy woman’s resume?”

I have also submitted my resume at the college where I teach for a full-time position. I don’t know if I am even remotely qualified because the job description was extremely vague but we’ll see if I get a call back.
So, I think this means I met my application goal this week. However, the one thing I didn’t do was really target the application process. It is hard to do that when applying for a job in a company in which you already have a profile, i.e. Hillenbrand Industries. Its not easy to change a profile with some of these on-line recruitment processes. Some of them, when you already have a profile in place and you apply, it just goes….I don’t know where it goes but it just goes…. What experience do you have with updating your profile on some of these sites? I would really like to know.