Employers Ignore Almost Everything On Your Application–Except This

It’s the holiday season, and millions of people are about to get a flood of unsolicited career advice from older relatives. Most of it will be useless. You don’t need to be told that a resume should be clear, uncluttered, and typo free. (A good summary of common, deal-breaking mistakes comes from Google HR head Laszlo Bock.) But don’t obsess over format and wording, which have rapidly diminishing returns. Nor should you winnow stacks of job ads to find the one that you fit perfectly. (Obsessively tailoring a cover letter to such a job isn’t as important as you might think either.) As we’ve said before, job ads are mostly nonsense. They describe an ideal candidate who the company doesn’t actually expect to find. In fact, if you perfectly match a job, you’re likely a bit overqualified. No, statistically speaking, there’s one thing that matters far more than any of these so-called bits of advice: Do you know someone at the company? A candidate with such a referral is much more likely to have their resume read, land an interview, and, ultimately, get an offer. Referrals account for between 30 and 50% of hires in the US. In a paper published earlier this year, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and MIT studied data from a financial services company, and found that while referrals only made up about 6% of total applications, they resulted in more than a quarter of hires. That’s more than the number hired via online job boards, even though those job hunters accounted for 60% of applications and 40% of interviews. In fact, a referral who gets an interview has a 40% better chance of getting hired than other candidates. Source:yahoo