Apply to EVERY job available? If a company is asking for a Java Linux software engineer they won’t accept a C Windows programmer; if they want an omelette chef and a ditch digger answers the posting this would waste their time with an unintelligently sent resume that makes a difficult and expensive candidate search process harder and lengthy, and is bound to elicit resentment.

I speak from my own experience as a job seeker. Recruiters (often from India or some other country) may use unintelligent search software to parse resumes and when they find “key” words, just send solicitations without bothering to read the resume. I may have a customer on my resume such as “The Oracle Chamber,” a New-Age outfit, and because the word “Oracle” shows up in an unintelligent search, I get solicitations for Oracle database professional positions while I have no such background. The same happens when I so much as mention ADABAS in passing (for full disclosure or completeness in describing a previous employer). I find this extremely irritating, and I’m sure prospective employers feel the same about inappropriate resumes for existing positions.

The idea of old-fashioned hard-copy snail-mail resumes makes sense, as does sending letters of introduction to companies where a given position does not exist (or is not advertised), providing we do our homework and send directly to a named contact instead of just to the company or to Human Resources. I just can’t accept the idea of the scattershot approach to specific advertised jobs.