I had a roommate who got an Electrical Engineering degree from Queens University (one of Canada's more prestigious universities). He then worked for Motorola somewhere in the USA (so he had the right visa) and had a few years experience. Then Motorola downsized, he got laid off and started looking for work. He wasn't getting many calls...
He applied to grad school at Purdue University and was accepted. His resume now said he was at Purdue University, but he hadn't done anything yet besides show up.
He sent off some more resumes and the next thing we knew, our (shared) phone was ringing constantly with people calling to offer my roommate a job.
While I was still in college, I had a resume up on Dice, hoping to land a job after graduation. It apparently flagged the recruiter bots, because I'd get calls... for contracts starting in a week, months before graduation.
I know these things aren't human screeners, but you would think that a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker who has to call and find out that the prospect is unavailable.
a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker
Did your resume have "NOT AVAILABLE FOR WORK BEFORE [MONTH]/[DAY]/[YEAR], AFTER WHICH I AM AVAILABLE" written across the top in red ink?
Presumably not. But, if not (and maybe even if so!) it would take way more time and skill for a human to (a) read your resume, (b) parse it, and (c) deduce that you were not available than for someone to type your contact phone number into a call-center system, awaiting the day when another human would deploy automated call-center software to place a call to you, ask "might you be available for a contract on date X?", and note down your answer.
The other problem, of course, is that it's incredibly easy to represent a phone number in a database, and it's fairly easy to represent "we called Prospect X about Potential Contract Y but she said no" in a database, but it is awfully hard to represent "Prospect X has a resume which suggests that he will graduate on date Z, and most likely that means he isn't available before date Z, unless he is down on his luck or has gotten bored with school or we misread the resume" in a database.
> you would think that a human would look at them for two seconds before the company spends money on the call center worker
I bet dollars to donuts that it's cheaper to just call everyone on a list, rather than take the few hours to sort through the resumes and throw out all the chaff.
i had exactly the same thing happen to me when i was looking for an internship semester last year, i got calls from 3 cruise staffers, im a comp sci student.. and then i somehow got 4 calls for senior positions.. how does that happen, my resume said "graduating summer 2010" in the first line under my name..
He applied to grad school at Purdue University and was accepted. His resume now said he was at Purdue University, but he hadn't done anything yet besides show up.
He sent off some more resumes and the next thing we knew, our (shared) phone was ringing constantly with people calling to offer my roommate a job.
I guess the robot recruiters liked "Purdue"!