While job seekers certainly have a valid point, they may not know the realities of a recruiting system, which often values expediency over good manners. Here are some facts to ponder: According to Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute?, the average company hires one person for every 1470 resumes it receives. Given this statistic, one can easily understand why most people don't find positions through want ads. While your chances are certainly better than winning the state lottery, and people do get jobs by responding to ads, the numbers are not in your favor. 

Suppose the average ad attracts 200-400 resumes. Sorting through these is arduous. Then there is scheduling a number of first-round interviews, eliminating applicants, and finally, making the offer. People whose resumes were set aside at the outset rarely get a second thought. Like most corporate departments, Human Resources has had to reduce its staff in the ongoing wave of corporate cutbacks. Limited personnel and time constraints often dictate concentrating on the A priorities. Rejected resumes usually fall into the C category. 

As for the post office boxes, there are several reasons for a company to use one. The firm doesn't want to be contacted by aggressive, ill-qualified job seekers. It prefers that its own employees don't know of its plans to fill a position currently occupied by an unsuspecting, about-to-be-fired executive. It may be an employment agency hoping to increase its pool of applicants. Sometimes the ad doesn't even represent a real position. Instead it lists a tantalizing combination of requirements guaranteed to solicit talented job seekers. While answering ads should take a back seat to networking in your job search priorities, ads can play an important role in the overall process. 

To give yourself an advantage in the screening process, concentrate on the ads that list a company's name. It's much easier to tailor your correspondence (No, a tailored letter with a generic resume won't get the job done) if you know to whom it's going. Here are some tips for encouraging a recruiter to put you in the interview pile. 

If you know the company but not the person who will review your resume, call the organization's main number and find out the name of the top Human Resources manager. Address your cover letter to him or her. Few people take the time to do this. It shows impressive initiative. 

While you're talking with the receptionist, see if you can also ascertain the name of the manager of the department where you would be working. Send a resume to that manager too. Probably very few resumes cross her desk. If she likes yours, it will automatically go into the interview pile. 

If you can't find a name, use Good Morning as a greeting. It's upbeat and it sounds a lot better than To Whom It May Concern or Dear Recruiter.  

Generally, cover letters have three main topics: 

• Why I'm interested. 
• Why you should be interested in me. 
• Let's get together to discuss our mutual needs. 

To write an eye-catching second paragraph summarizing your relevant skills and background, take your cues from the ad. Look carefully at the job description and the requirements for the position. Then construct three to five sentences that show how your experience specifically matches what the employer is seeking. A good ad wears its heart on its sleeve; it outlines exactly what it wants in an applicant. Pay close attention to what the screener hopes to see and you'll capture his attention and make the interview pile. 
Sometimes, if you're persistent, you can identify a company through its P.O. box. Call the post office representing the zip code in the address. If the firm's box rental application states that it deals with the public, the name of the firm is public information that the post office will reveal, and you will earn a star for resourcefulness. If not, you will have to be content to use Good Morning for a greeting and more generic information in your letter. 

Responding to all ads with your one, perfect resume is a sure way to commit job search suicide, even with a tailored cover letter. A potential employer wants to know specifically what you can do for him. If you craft your resume for each opening as carefully as you've constructed your cover letter, the screener will note the difference and give you the opportunity to talk to him in person. Begin by stating a specific objective. Example: MIS Manager for Alpha Corporation. Then make sure the rest of your resume speaks to this position. 

If you use a qualifications summary, make it relevant to your job objective. Phrases like Results oriented, Hands-on and People person have become clichés, unlike the following example. 

OBJECTIVE: Marketing Manager for XYZ Corp. 
PERSONAL QUALIFICATIONS: 

• Eighteen months of front-line experience in marketing and selling international products and services. 
• Understanding of global economics. 
• Skilled at bringing people together to pursue a common goal whether within my firm or among partner institutions. 
• Willing to relocate. 

Prioritize everything you put in your resume, putting the most important facts on the top two-thirds of the first page. Remember, you're hitting the high points here, not telling a life story. 

In fact, a listing of job titles and duties can make pretty boring reading. On the other hand, accomplishments that outline your unique contribution put real sizzle in your resume. 

Name-dropping can also be useful. If you've worked with highly respected clients, give their names. If your responsibility covered an eight-state area, mention it. 

When you are listing your job title, company and dates of employment, think about what would be most impressive to the reader, and put it first, or in bold type or italics. (Dates rarely deserve this honor.) 

Use an outline format, rather than paragraphs. Information grouped in more than 3-4 line clumps looks onerous, especially if you're reading 400 resumes. 

Include continuing education along with your degree(s) in the Education section. Savvy employers will appreciate your efforts to keep current with state of the art developments. 

If you've said you will call to schedule an appointment, do it. But this is only possible where you've been able to identify whom to call. For the companies that prefer to remain anonymous, there is a way to ascertain whether they have received your resume, but it requires some chutzpah. Actually, the precedent has already been set with wedding invitations that quite often include a reply card and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Why not apply this to resumes? Enclose a self-addressed, stamped post card that says something like: 

You are, undoubtedly, inundated with resumes responding to your ad. However, I would really appreciate your taking a moment to check the appropriate reply on this card and dropping it in the mail : 

• We have received your resume and will be calling you for an appointment. 
• We have received your resume. While it is not the best match for our current opening, we will keep it on file for future positions. 
• Your background is not a good fit for our company.  

According to Holly Tullis, EDS's Staffing Manager in charge of electronic resume scanning, (resume) image and sorting systems will be the way companies screen applicants in the future. When you take a look at the numbers, you can understand why she says this. In mid-1994, Jim Caraway, EDS's Director of Staffing, said the company had 12,000 resumes in its Resumix database and was hoping to eventually accumulate about 100,000. As of fall 1995, EDS had almost 200,000 resumes in its electronic filing system and was adding new applicants at a rate of 20,000 per month. To keep the number of resumes at a reasonable level, the firm has to purge all but the most qualified technical candidates once per year and the non-technical ones every six months. 

Without a very sophisticated automated tracking system, there is no way EDS can possibly make the resumes of 200,000 people available for matching as new positions become available. From Tullis's and Caraway's perspective, the automated tracking system is a useful tool for their company and its applicants. 

Electronic applicant tracking is a system used to scan your resume into a computer so it can be accessed later.  It may be stored exactly as you submitted it, in a computer language called ASCII, in an extracted summary which focuses on predetermined key words to capture the essence of your skills and experience, or in some combination thereof. Specifically, here's how it works:  

Your resume is scanned into the computer as an image. Then OCR (optical character recognition) software looks at the image to distinguish every letter and number (character) and creates a text file (ASCII). Then artificial intelligence reads the text and extracts important information about you such as your name, address, phone number, work history, years of experience, education and skills. 

Because this process is still in its infancy, organizations that scan and store resumes do it with varying levels of sophistication. Some scan just about any resume, including those with italics and underlining, while another employer's software might not recognize even the slightest differences from plain text such as bolding. 

While job seekers may fear being chosen or rejected by a machine, there are some advantages to sending your resume to a firm that has an automated tracking system. Here are some of them: 

• With continual downsizing and the advent of the executive with portfolio, it's important to keep your credentials in circulation. Resume databases can help you do this. 
• They can also give you a vehicle for automatically updating your resume if you make the effort to contact your key databases every six months to a year. 
• Just as online service providers can offer employers access to qualified applicants around the world, they can also provide you with a gateway to thousands of opportunities you would never have heard about even a few years ago. 
• Using a resume database service is much more time and cost effective than a direct mail campaign. 
• Often it's difficult to move to another department within a corporation or government agency because your manager is blocking you, or you don't know anyone outside your own arena. Fortunately, internal tracking systems contain resumes from people throughout the organization. If your credentials match an available position, you'll get an interview. 

It goes against human nature to accept being screened by a machine. After all, computers aren't nearly as smart as people, nor are they as discerning when it comes to identifying the human factors or personality traits that set apart the people who can do the job from the ones who will and want to. Even the most sophisticated sorting programs have a long way to go before they possess the insight and finesse of a skilled recruiter. 

Because of its heavy reliance on key word searches, resume scanning will generally put any career changer out of the running. Think about an officer who's retiring from the military and moving to civilian life. Even if he has had years of highly regarded experience leading an elite corps of paratroopers, can he make his background fit the specific key words a corporate computer is looking for? It's most unlikely. Yet this individual may make an exceptional manager in any number of situations where he can apply his seasoned leadership skills and quickly learn the special knowledge needed for the job. 

While one often reads that businesses are looking for professionals who wear many hats and possess good communication skills, computers programmed to pull only those resumes with very specific key word matches haven't been given this message. As far as they are concerned, generalists are not needed. 

The same can be true for college graduates with liberal arts degrees. 
If these articulate, broadly educated first-time job seekers don't have a good internship or two on their resumes, they may be rejected for lack of technical expertise, even though they are brilliant, quick learners. 

Remember that a resume is not the most likely way for you to get an interview. Most interviews come through job fairs, on-campus interviews and networking contacts. Fortunately generalists, career changers and liberal arts graduates tend to be pretty good at developing rapport with other people. And it's people who make the hiring decisions. If your experience isn't suited to a key word search, make a habit of going directly to the managers who can say yes. Computers can't get in your way if you make an end run around them. 

When you are writing a resume that will be read by a computer, there are two factors you need to keep in mind: format and key word content. 

Format deals with how a resume looks. It includes elements such as white space, font type and size, paper selection, bold or underlined titles, and a variety of other elements that make a resume pleasing to the eye and easy to read. Unfortunately, what is most attractive to human screeners may drive computers crazy, slow down the entire scanning system, and result in a bunch of stored gibberish. To avoid becoming a tracking system statistic, keep these things in mind when you are formatting your resume: 

• Select a printing grade of white or some other light-colored paper. 
• Print only on one side of 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheets. 
• Use either a laser or a very good quality ink jet printer. 
• Don't fold, staple or mutilate your resume unless you want to sabotage the system and end all hope of getting a job with ABC company. 
• Use a standard type face in a 10 to14 point font size. 
• Always put your most important data: your name, address and phone numbers, each on their own lines at the top of your resume. Otherwise the scanner is likely to run them all together. 
• Include your name at the top left corner of every subsequent page. This can save confusion should a page accidentally be orphaned somewhere in the process. 
• Give the scanner lots of white space to separate one important element of your resume from another. Go to a second or even a third page instead of opting for one or two pages of cramped text. 
• Confine yourself to ALL CAPS or boldface type when delineating major section headings from less important items, because the majority of scanners can read both of these. Don't use italics or underlining. 
• Keep your format simple. Employing boxes, shading, graphics, hollow bullets and other intriguing elements only serve to confuse computers. 
• Because it is so difficult for many scanners to read degraded (faxed or copied) text, always send a hard copy original of your resume. 
• Always include a cover letter with your resume. While the computer may pay little attention to it, it will record a text image. Then, if you make the initial screening cut, the hiring manager may want to look at a copy of your actual letter and resume to get a better feel for your style and personality. 
• If you are replying to an ad on the Internet, it is best to send it in an ASCII (computer language) format, rather than typical text. If you don't use ASCII your resume may reach its destination as an assortment of interesting hieroglyphs instead of the brilliant prose you intended. 

Once your resume makes it through image scanning, it is translated into ASCII language and automatically searched for pre-designated key words.'' 

A key word is a noun or noun phrase that specifies particular types of experience, education, professional organizations, certificates or licenses, or number of years in a given role. Some typical key words for a Human Resources professional might be: Salary and Benefits Administration, Training and Develop-ment, Affirmative Action, Executive Compensation, Union Liaison, Recruit-ing, Salary Survey, EAP Program, Downsizing, Re-engineering, Health Care Cost Containment and Govern-ment Reports, among others. Note that these are very specific descriptors for learned bodies of information. Transfer-able skills such as planning, organizing, creating and listening rarely become key words, even though they might play an equally important role in the position for which the resume was written. 

For the computer to select you as a likely candidate for a particular job, you must make liberal use of the key words commonly linked with that position throughout your resume. You are actually playing a numbers game where winning the selection lottery will depend upon how many times you've hit on the key words a potential employer has decided are either critical, useful or nice to have in a qualified applicant. The people with the most hits get the chance to talk to a real person. Those who have made no effort to tailor their resumes don't. 

Below are some tips for enhancing your chances of appealing to the computer: 

• State a specific objective. It will be your first key word. 
• Use a Key Word Summary after your objective to highlight the most important assets you have to offer an employer. 
• Stress accomplishments and results rather than duties and responsibilities. 
• Use the same sections and headings as you would for any resume. The key word summary is the only exception. 

As with non-scanner resumes, you must be truthful and concise. However, you can change buzz words to match industries and careers. For instance, a teacher hoping to move into corporate training can substitute words such as training for teaching and program design for lesson plans and possibly have enough key words to make the interview stack. Whether he or she can convince an HR recruiter, who wants only trainers with corporate experience, that she deserves the position may be another story. 

• Give dates of employment using specific numerical years, not words, or delete dates altogether. Example: Use 1993-1996, not three years when you are talking about the time you have spent in a position or activity. 
• Use synonyms if a key word might be described in more than one way.  If you aren't sure what the specific key words for a particular position are, then use more than one name to describe an activity. 
• Be careful of acronyms and abbreviations, unless you are confident the ones in your resume are the ones everyone uses. When in doubt, spell them out. 
• Specific degrees, universities, leadership programs, professional licenses, certifications, trade organizations and honors can all be key words used to pull a targeted group of resumes for further action. 
• Send only one resume to a company with an automated tracking system. When every resume goes into the same computer database, a person with more zone in the system immediately looks desperate, sneaky or forgetful.