Can You Petition The Lords Of HR For A Job?

Thanks to the Great Flood of resumes and applicants HR departments and their algorithms process every day, it does, indeed, seem that only a petition or a prayer is going to get you in the door. The trouble is, it doesn’t work.

Can You Petition The Lords Of HR For A Job?

“When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with Prayer … petition the Lord with prayer … petition the Lord with prayer…”

So preached Jim Morrison at the beginning of an iconic song by The Doors, “The Soft Parade.” Then Morrison paused and roared with fire and brimstone, “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!”

And so it is with the Lords of the HR departments where you want to get a job. Thanks to the Great Flood of resumes and applicants HR departments and their algorithms process every day, it does, indeed, seem that only a petition or a prayer is going to get you in the door. The trouble is, it doesn’t work.

Back in the day (before the internet), job seekers were counseled to submit their paper resumes to HR so they would be noticed—by printing them, for example, on salmon-colored paper. A resume that stood out in the stack would be read, thereby increasing the chance that you’d be hired. One successful wag stapled it to a box of pizza and had it delivered by a guy in a gorilla suit.

The problem was—and still is—that tricks work sometimes, but rarely, and you cannot petition HR with tricks. While you’re doing that, the person who gets hired is being introduced to the real hiring authority by a higher authority—a professional contact the manager trusts and respects. According to any survey or study we look at, that’s how most jobs are found and filled. (See “What Do Your (Cough-Cough) Recruiters Do All Day Long?”) But that’s not news or clickbait, so what works doesn’t get much attention.

Clickbait and feel-good preachers have always received attention, and suckers want to feel good quickly. Thus, one article in BuzzFeed, “This Guy Sent In A ‘GQ’-Style CV Good Enough To Earn Him An Offer Without Any Interview,” is the source of another article in The Muse, “This Bold Out-of-the-Box CV Scored This Guy His Dream Gig (No Interview Required!,” which also cites yet another clickbait sermon, “Here’s One Way to Stand Out When You’re Competing Against Hundreds of Qualified Candidates.” Hey, there must be something to this!

BuzzFeed cites a guy who landed a marketing internship at GQ by submitting a resume that’s a mock-up of the magazine featuring him as the cover story. According to the reporter, Sumukh Mehta scored a paid internship in the U.K. with this petition—without even an interview. But he’s in Bengaluru and has no idea “how to get to the U.K. to claim the internship.” The author said about this resume cleverness: “Thinking of revamping mine soon.” I wonder if she’ll invest the three weeks Mehta did to make the mock-up.

The Muse goes on to offer “5 Crazy Ways People Got The Attention Of Hiring Managers”:

Bold, out-of-the-box, creative, crazy—it’s all marketing, right? (See “The Naked Truth About Resumes.”) All the articles admit such practices are not likely to work. So why promote them?

One of the articles listed above reminds us that “recruiters only read a resume for an average of six seconds.” Then it goes on to describe how to produce an “infographic summary” of your credentials loaded with the logos of schools, companies, and organizations you’re connected to—along with dense, verbose, tiny-font “visuals.” Jennifer Little-Fleck (“a former hiring manager”) closes with: “How can this not stand out when compared to a boring old black-and-white job application?”

How can anyone “read” that stuff in six seconds?

Maybe you missed it. In the middle of this column I pointed out that most jobs are found and filled through personal contacts—people who hiring managers know, trust, and listen to. In marketing, we call this “word of mouth”—the most valuable kind of marketing there is. Resumes and applications have little to do with it.

More important: Recruiters who process resumes (trust me: they don’t read them) don’t make hiring decisions. Hiring managers make hiring decisions. You don’t have to petition the Lords of HR for anything. Not when the decision maker wants to meet you through a trusted professional referral. Even praying doesn’t work as well.