Is this a true statement? I am sure there are people who would have received job enquiries for positions they have not applied for. And even got some of them. The job of a recruiter is ensuring open reqs reach the maximum number of people. That is a marketing effort by the company. But unless one responds you won’t get it.

Applying for a job does not mean it has to be a job you identified. You might have got notified about it. Or someone sends you an email as you are in their mailing list. We all get that daily. But we will not have a chance if we do not respond.

If we are a job seeker, it is important that we have to apply and we should apply with the intention to get the job. I know it can be frustrating because not always do we get a response back from the company or recruiters. And not all roles are a good fit to us.

The point I want to make is if we are actively looking for a job, we cannot let things happen without us taking that effort. Actively looking and responding to requests and in the process connecting with people.

My inbox always has at least one message from a recruiter. I have both been rejected and accepted via applications. I have got jobs through recruiters and I have got jobs where I have gone to company websites and applied. 

Many times people feel that if they apply on websites it will go into a pile of resumes and not get noticed. References are always good, but my experience says that applying on the website also helps. In the past 12 years 3 of my roles were where I applied on the company website. 3 were through recruiters and one was through a reference. So it is a mixed bag. 

Interestingly all positions that were through recruiters were contract roles and all full time permanent roles I got were me finding and applying on the website. So if we think applying on a company website might not get you a response, it is just that we are not applying at the right place. 

I will share an interesting note here. One of the jobs I had applied for and never got a response. Then I applied after seven months and I got a response and even got the job. There can be many reasons for that but that is for another day.

Categories: Career, Career & Work, Work & Career

Tags: applying for jobs, Resume