Confession: When I was a recruiter, I ghosted people too
Anyone who worked for a popular, well known company saying they haven’t missed rejections in an ATS or LI outreach, I call BS.
Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes I was too busy, sometimes because it’s easy to miss messages in LinkedIn if you get a lot, sometimes people sent me messages that were so presumptuous I couldn’t even imagine how to craft a response that didn’t sound highly irritated. Don’t even get me started on the “hey girl, want to chat” messages that plagued 15 years ago LinkedIn inboxes when people (men) forgot this wasn’t a dating app.
But mostly, responding to all outreach kindly and politely could have been its own part time job. I find old unanswered messages in my LinkedIn all the time for people I actually know now or am trying to connect with. I cringe every time.
I still believe you should reach out anyway.
I always recommend people find ways to reach out that are not just throwing your resume into an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) filled with 1,000 others, or an easy apply box on LinkedIn that someone may or may not be constantly monitoring.
Your odds are still better than 1 in 1,000 when you reach out to a recruiter, even better if it’s a hiring manager, and occasionally better when it’s neither but instead someone else in the company. Every single resume sent to me as a recruiter by someone in my company got at least a glance. That’s what this is for: GETTING SEEN.
Those messages are about increasing your odds of getting your info in front of someone. It’s still a numbers game, and there are a million reasons why you might not get a response, including busy recruiters, they didn’t think you were qualified, they have too many applicants, they never saw it and the list goes on. It’s like expecting someone to respond to every spam message in their inbox, but again SPAM WORKS or people wouldn’t keep spamming you.
I have been helping people get jobs as a career coach for many years now and I can tell you that following people, commenting on content, building your network, following companies, all of those things help you (part two of this post coming soon with more tips there). Cold outreach to a recruiter you have never connected with just to ask them to look at your resume out of nowhere, it MAY work, but it’s not the most likely of things to get you hired.
🔥DO IT ANYWAY🔥, the same way you put your application into an ATS, it’s covering your bases. But stop being upset at recruiters and hiring managers for not responding, shoot your shot and know that it may or may not work (sorry recruiters, I know y’all are tired). Also stop calling that networking. It’s outreach, not networking.
Keep doing it anyway, (along with all the other ways to increase your chances) because it does work, just not every time.
Thanks for coming to this less fun but always truthful advice post.
#jobseekers, #careeradvice, #opentowork, #networking
