According to research by employment search website Simply Hired, hiring managers get an average of 34 applications per job listing, but they spend time genuinely considering an average of only 12.6% of them – that’s less than 1/3. Some applicants may feel the need to go above and beyond the average application and do something unusual or unexpected to grab the hiring manager’s attention.
Simply Hired conducted a survey to find out whether or not “nontraditional” strategies to stand out are worth the risk, or whether it makes sense to stick to a traditional resume and cover letter. They surveyed over 500 hiring managers and over 500 job applicants to find out what sort of outside-of-the-box approaches applicants are willing to take, and which ones do and don’t pay off.
Most notably, the survey found that over 63% of hiring managers find attention-grabbing gimmicks totally unacceptable, with only 20.2% saying they were acceptable. Hiring managers were also given a list of unusual strategies to rank from most to least acceptable. Unsurprisingly, the least acceptable strategy was offering to sleep with the hiring manager – which should really go without saying.
Interestingly, hiring managers also really disliked when applicants persistently emailed their resumes over and over until they got a response. One or two follow-up emails after your initial application aren’t such a bad idea – but if you don’t get a response after that, continuing to pester the hiring manager isn’t going to help.
While sending baked goods to the office was considered a somewhat acceptable strategy, sending those same cookies to the manager’s home address was a big no-no. Desserts might sweeten your application, but not if you cross a professional boundary by bringing them to someone’s home – that’s just creepy.
Another tactic that hiring managers received fairly positively was “enduring extreme weather to hand-deliver a resume” – but waiting around for inclement weather to apply for a job doesn’t seem very efficient. However, hiring managers did respond well to applicants who went out of their way to demonstrate a skill, for example, by creating a mock product or presentation or completing their interview in a second language. A librarian who was surveyed said she landed her job by making her resume into a book and creating QR codes with links to her portfolio, while a woman applying to work at the hotel hopped behind the counter and started checking customers in.
It’s worth noting that while most hiring managers aren’t into your gimmicks and games, of the 12.9% of applicants who said they have risked an unusual strategy, 67.7% of those actually landed the job.
Still, it’s probably a safer bet to stick to the protocol and not try any theatrics. So then, what can you actually do to improve your chances of landing the job?
Applicants surveyed tended to focus most of their time on their resumes, but according to hiring managers, the interview and cover letter are “the top ways to stand out among the rest.” Sure, brush up your resume, but make sure to give equal time to writing a strong cover letter and practicing potential interview questions.
In the survey, applicants also tended to overestimate the importance of knowing people within the company and having a “unique” cover letter and interview question answers; meanwhile, they underestimated the importance of asking smart questions at the interview and personality. In fact, hiring managers reported that personality was the most impactful factor in their hiring decisions.
It appears that the best way to stand out in a job interview is to wow them with your personality and nail the interview. Weird outfits, stunts, and baked goods will only get you so far – and in fact, may backfire.
Benn Rosales
October 15, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Ajax and why not joomla instead of drupal?
Pete Brand
October 15, 2007 at 5:26 pm
I think you are right on! The problem is most web development companies skip through discovery (from the creative side) and framing and go directly to the prototyping. The good solid companies know the importance of quality design, ease of use, and functionality. If you forget any of the three…the site will be ineffective.
Shailes Ghimire
October 15, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Kelley,
Very timely. Our website is old – I put it together in early 2005 using Dreamweaver (static HTML). I’ve been thinking about a makeover. Following your journey will be very helpful.
Do you know if Flash is still a big no no when it comes to SEO?
Thanks for sharing!
Kelley Koehler
October 15, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Benn – Ah, mostly because we already know Drupal and don’t know Joomla. I’ll point it out to Hubby, but unless it has some defining feature that we can’t live without, we’ll most likely go Drupal. There will be tradeoffs between existing technology knowledge and time it takes to learn new stuff as we go along.
Pete – The starting discovery work is the least fun and exciting, but necessary. Working with interface and design is a lot more entertaining, but we don’t want to end up with a pretty but useless site.
Shailesh – Looking into the seo-ness of technologies will come a little bit later in the process, but from some initial research, Flash doesn’t really ‘read’ for the bots, it’s just a big binary file. I’ve heard not to do menus in Flash because those nice words in the menus won’t be ‘read’ as part of the site. We’ll probably only do the search interface in Flash. The actual search interface isn’t necessarily something I need crawled – just a bunch of blank boxes and drop-downs – and I found a function that can present something different to search bots and those without flash installed without being considered blackhat. The only thing from the search that would be nice to have crawled would be a list of subdivisions, but we can take care of that in a much better way elsewhere on the site.