Online Job Hunting Tough

Most companies with Web sites allow people to apply directly for jobs online. But do those applications ever get anywhere?

Dan Zarling has doubts. Since being laid off in November from U.S. Bancorp Asset Management, the 40-year-old former senior equity analyst has applied for jobs through six company Web sites -- and found it frustrating at best, he says. The applications can be so complex that "it's almost like you're applying for credit," Mr. Zarling says. The feedback from companies, meanwhile, is spotty.

"Some of them you get zero response back from, and you kind of wonder, what did I just do?" he says. "There was no acknowledgment that you spent a half hour trying to get your information to them."

The unpleasant truth, according to job seekers, career counselors and even some companies, is that applying for jobs on corporate Web sites is often a complicated and frustrating process. A few companies do a majority of hiring via their online systems. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., in New York, says 77% of its hires so far this year started on the corporate Web site, and that includes entry level jobs up to some vice-president positions. But the process tends to be cloaked in mystery for job seekers themselves, who often shoot their credentials into cyberspace without ever hearing anything back.

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin, who run CareerXroads, a Kendall Park, N.J., recruiting-technology-consulting firm, set out to test what the typical experience is like. They invented a fictional job applicant named Vinnie Boombotz (a long-time joke name favored by comedians). Posing as Mr. Boombotz, the two men recently applied to nearly 400 large companies.
Mr. Boombotz's resume was patently ridiculous. It described him as a C.P.A., or "certified protection associate" at "Bad-a-Bing Corporation," and stated that in his current capacity as a collections supervisor he had "eliminated turnover and competition." It was balanced with some plausible work experience, however, and was designed to slip past a computer without a sense of humor. Because of the specifications at individual companies, not all parts of the resume were submitted to each company.

It's unclear how many companies caught on. More than half spat out a curt but encouraging automated e-mail to Mr. Boombotz thanking him for applying. At least six suggested that he apply for specific openings. J.P. Morgan, for instance, identified Mr. Boombotz as a possible match for an opening for a fraud hotline analyst, while Merck & Co. informed him of an opening for a merchandise analyst in a similarly worded e-mail. Mirant, a global energy company based in Atlanta, saw him as a possible candidate for a payroll accountant's job and a senior accountant position, among others. Several companies rejected Mr. Boombotz for the positions he originally applied for, but encouraged him to apply for other openings in the future.

Applicants to corporate Web sites are met with silence for many reasons. The competition is often stiff, since automation allows job seekers to flood the systems, leaving many companies facing the task of wading through thousands of resumes a month, and making it all but impossible to provide any individual feedback. (Merck, for instance, gets 30,000 resumes every month.)

Job listings themselves are sometimes out of date. While the Internet originally promised more efficient connections, "where it does not live up to the hype is with actually connecting with the hiring managers with openings," says Nancy Collamer, a Greenwich, Conn., career coach and author of "Layoff Survival Guide."

Many companies use automated systems to scan resumes for certain key words to weed the ranks, but the systems are imperfect at distinguishing among candidates. Some targets of the Vinnie Boombotz hoax insist their automated recruiting systems work well and provided the right feedback -- even in the case of Mr. Boombotz.

"In Vinnie's case, he bid on a job and he was rejected by a recruiter," says Michael DeAngelo, manager of staffing programs at Merck. Mr. DeAngelo has tracked Mr. Boombotz's application and determined that three e-mails were sent to him: one acknowledging his interest in Merck; another rejecting him for a staff accountant position; and a third telling him that his profile, based on his career interests, matched another opening. Merck kept the resume in its database because it was a version that didn't contain some of the more humorous aspects and therefore wasn't instantly recognized as a hoax, Mr. DeAngelo says. The resume sent to Merck listed Mr. Boombotz's address as Greeneyeshade Place in Lotsamoola, N.J.

Mr. Boombotz received a similar string of e-mails from J.P. Morgan. "The technology did its job," says Marion Dino, a national staffing executive at J.P. Morgan. Candidate profiles are based on job skills and experience listed by candidates during the online-application process, Ms. Dino says.

"This guy was not offered positions," says James Peters, a Mirant spokesman. "The system is working, because eventually the human element would come into play."

Automated screening tools are a necessity today, say all three companies. More than 500,000 people have entered the J.P. Morgan candidate database alone during the past 18 months. For some sales positions, Merck can receive as many as 2,000 resumes, according to Mr. DeAngelo. "You can't run a business and try to fill that job and talk to everyone that wants a job," he says.
Indeed, all three companies' systems performed better than the dozens of others that didn't send Mr. Boombotz any acknowledgment at all (although it's impossible to know if any of those companies figured out the resume was a hoax).

Maintaining candidate profiles, as each company does, enables them to alert job seekers to fresh openings and allows company recruiters to build long-term relationships with highly qualified candidates, they say.

Some job seekers, however, complain that real-life recruiters don't enter the hiring process often enough. The black hole that eats up resumes sent to corporate Web sites has become a cliche of job seeking during the past few years.

Laura Levitan, 45, says she has applied to positions through 25 corporate Web sites since she started her job search in January. After receiving nothing more than an automated reply in each case, she has given up hope of ever landing a position online. "I've stopped," Ms. Levitan says. "If there's a company that I really want to work for, I will just network into it."

Automated systems aren't going away anytime soon, however. By allowing companies to staff their recruiting teams more leanly and make more hires without paying for ads or expensive search firms, the systems are incredibly cost-effective. Mr. DeAngelo says Merck has saved "several million dollars" over the past year by relying more on its corporate Web site to find candidates.

Mr. Boombotz is likely to suffer an indignity in comparison with his real-life counterparts: Candidates generally remain in company databases for six to 12 months, but Mr. Boombotz won't be so lucky.

"Since we now know that he's not a real candidate, we're rubbing him out," says Peter Kelly, a staffing relationship manager at J.P. Morgan