Managing Your Candidacy

When you have completed your job application, you are now a candidate for that job. Your candidacy is managed through the activities of the company you sent your resume to. Through activities you will document phone calls, summarize company research, cross-reference the relevant players, and manage all facets of the hiring process. Your next goal is to get submitted.

To our disappointment, we failed to convey the significance of submittals to the taberatti based on feedback from our earlier releases. We expand on submittals here.

Submittals

Submittals, while important to the point of having legal implications, are actually quite simple. All they really mean is that you have been considered a serious candidate. That's all. You have succeeded in rising to the top of the resume stack. The first battery of qualifiers - the first and largest hurdle - on your way to accepting a job offer is behind you.

If you send a resume to a recruiter and they say they are going to send your resume to the employer for their review, then you can consider that a submittal. Recruiters are intimately familiar with the concept of submittals and they will typically tell you, point blank if they are submitting your resume or not.

Rarely will there ever be any ambiguity associated with your candidacy when working with a recruiter, otherwise you are working with a real beginner or someone with an ulterior motive.

If you send your resume to an employer and HR calls you to ask you about anything such as your legal status, or experience in a certain area and you give them the answers they were looking for, it is highly likely they will be passing your resume on to the manager. Don't be afraid to ask them point blank if they are going to submit your resume to the hiring manager. If so, that is a submittal. If a manager from the employer calls you for the purpose of discussing your experience, you most definitely can consider yourself submitted. Even if a hiring manager takes one look at your resume and passes on it, you can still consider your candidacy to have made it to submittal status.

And why would you consider this noteworthy? In the beginning of the job search, most job seekers are unprepared for the number of times they are going to be passed over. They are going to be dumb founded as to why they were never called back for a job they thought they were perfect for. Even when they have a professionally prepared resume and great experience they are going to be passed over from time to time. It happens and the reasons vary widely.

Resumes are increasingly read by machines. If you don't have the right keywords, they won't be able to find you.
Resumes are often read by people who have no idea of what you do for a living. HR professionals or even office temps brought in to sort out all the applicants can easily misunderstand your qualifications and put your resume in the wrong pile.
The job requisitions may have been prepared by a manager with poor writing skills. Even the resumes they receive that meet their written specifications may not be what they are really looking for.
Sometimes job requisitions are prepared by managers who cannot do the job they are trying to fill and may not be sure of what they really need. Managers who have fallen behind in the latest technology would typify this genre.
Sheer volume of applicants. In a 60 Minutes broadcast in the fall of 2004, Google.com revealed that they receive over 1,000 unsolicited resumes a day. Can you imagine the response when they publicly post a job requisition?
Any number of other factors to include timeliness of your application, an unexpected budget cut, or insider connections allowing a less qualified applicant to trump your candidacy.

Therefore, if your candidacy makes it to submitted status it is a testament that you are doing things right. It may not mean that you are doing everything right, but it certainly means you are doing some things right. This serves as valuable feedback that you are maturing in your ability to sell yourself to a prospective employer. Again, even if you don't get a job offer you are moving in the right direction. Keeping an eye on how many times you are submitted from one week to the next can be valuable feedback over time.

In sum, we are trying to differentiate the effort that succeeded versus the effort that didn't in giving you the visibility you need to advance in the hiring process. Many of the resumes you send out will disappear into the ether. These were managed as 'Sent Resumes' in earlier versions of JobTabs and were of little consequence. As a result of the feedback we have received, we are providing the means to open and close every single job you pursue. In sum, submittals are good - very good. Move them into your job search lexicon and you will be able to better manage your job search.

See Also

Activities: Submittals | Submittals - Adding and Editing