Getting The InterviewSo you've got your resume and cover letter set up and you've sent them off for that next dream job. Assuming that you're not going through a firm or a headhunter then you still have to do some work. Just because you may be the perfect person for a job, and your resume is in the system, that doesn't mean it will ever be read.See, you have to remember that the HR people are not your friends yet, even though they tend to be very friendly people. Their job is also not to find the best person on the planet for a particular position. Their job is to find 3-5 good fits that could fill a position and put those people in front of the decision makers. Because, think about this. A decision maker has to make decisions about a lot of things. They're busy people. So they don't want to interview 40 people when they could find a good fit after just a few. So your goal is to be on the top of the pile. Aside from nepotism there are a couple of ways to accomplish this. If you know someone in the company, get them to do an internal submission for you. Those are normally put higher on the queue, and you can get your friend to go to the HR person directly to find out if they've gotten the resume, and where they are in the hiring process. It also helps because your friend can be assumed to be someone that knows the culture fit, so you're already partially pre-screened. If you don't know anyone then you might need to be a bit duplicitous. This is a bit sneaky and underhanded, but I've seen it work at law firms, schools for educational positions, when applying for office manager positions, and in my own computer industry. You send your resume in before noon. Then around 1 o'clock either call (if you can get a number) or email and say something like "I sent you a resume this morning, and I just found out that some of the attachments I was sending out were getting corrupted. Could you do me a huge favor and just open the attachment real quickly? I just want to make sure it got to you ok." There are a lot of reasons that this works.
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