I recently read a post by Henry Blodget (http://tiny.cc/XhsSL) where he discusses the scariest jobs chart ever, we have lost 8.4 million jobs to date and so on…

This got me to thinking are there any open jobs out there? A quick jump over to Indeed. Com shows me that there have been 882,000 new jobs posted across the US in the last 7 days. In the DC Metro area where I live there are currently new 183,000 jobs posted.

These are just the jobs posted by companies that actually put their openings on the web, and you will find that most companies don’t post all of their openings either. Add in the organizations that don’t post their openings on the web and I am guessing that there might be well over 1 million (maybe even close to 2 million) open jobs out there today!

Which begs the question, where is the break down and why are more people not getting hired? Some of it can be skill set related but I have some ideas which I will try to lay out in the following example of a reoccurring call I have several times a day. It goes something like this…

Candidate: Mike, thanks for taking my call, can you take a look at my resume and help me out!

Me: Sure, I can do that. First let me ask, what have you been doing up to this point with your job search?

Candidate: Well I’ve applied to several companies via the web and have submitted my info for several jobs posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, Hot Jobs, etc. But I haven’t heard back, and I don’t know why.

Me: That is well and good, but do you understand how the web based resume databases work?

Candidate: Ummm no not really…

Me: Okay let me walk you through it. The short version is your resume goes into a black hole! The longer version is that your resume goes into the database along with several thousand other resume. An in house recruiter pulls up the requisition and looks to see the latest resumes that have been pulled up by the keyword matching technology. So if you have the most matching keywords on your resume it might end up on the top.

Candidate: That does not seem very promising.

Me: Oh, it gets better! Since companies have had to cut back they have gotten rid of most of their internal recruiting function so the recruiters that are left now might be working on 30 to 40 opening at one time. Which means they really are not even looking at qualifications, they are just taking the top five resumes (the ones with the most keywords) and forwarding them to the hiring manager in the hopes that one or two will pass the managers initial screen. Then it is on to the next requisition. This cycle occurs ad infinitum.

Candidate: Geesh, that is somewhat depressing. How do they hire anyone and what do I do now?

Me: HA, that is the $64,000 question. Ultimately they do make hires through these systems but it is a laborious process. Now let’s talk about how you can be proactive in your search…

Sound familiar? Have you experienced this frustration? If skill set is not the issue, maybe this is the challenge with your job search. Let us know what you think.