Resume distribution services are the biggest scam going. But they’re seductive, aren’t they? Only fifty bucks to reach thousands and thousands of recruiters and employers! How can you miss? Easily. What the blaster services have going for them is that potential customers, like you, respond to their marketing from your purely assumptive point of view, rather than applying logic or viewing it from the recipient’s.
To you, the odds sound tough to miss. Thousands? If even a few hundred respond, think of all the interviews you’ll have! You’ve also assumed that the service has done their homework, carefully researching the validity of each address. And perhaps even that they’ve forged relationships with these recruiters and employers, who are each, in turn, eagerly awaiting the next “blast” of resumes from the service. Fallacy, fallacy, fallacy.
The email addresses aren’t qualified. Usually they’ve been harvested, even if it’s from a legitimate source like The Kennedy Guide to Executive Recruiters. Consequently a large percentage bounce back, and for those addresses that are legitimate, your resume is viewed as spam, and more often than not, simply deleted.
Let’s start with a look at the Kennedy Guide, an extremely valuable tool, and one, by the way, that you can find in the reference section of any library, or purchase on line access to for $60.00. Got that? For about the same price, you can have the real thing and not the imitation. And even so, you need the most recent edition because the info in it goes out of date quickly.
Additionally, I know one retained search firm that put a general catch-all email address in there. They received so many resumes from it – many from blasting services – that every day or so, they just deleted the entire inbox. Better you use the guide for the other wealth of information it provides, and call them to qualify their specialties and geographical area of concentration. You can get the guide here: www.kennedyinfo.com. It’s absolutely worth the $60.00 online access price.
Employers who are actively hiring, receive enough unqualified resumes from their ads for specific positions without having to take the time to look at ones that come through a blind service for which they didn’t pay. These companies already know that those resumes have nothing to do with their business or their hiring needs of the moment, 99% of the time. For the other 1%, it’s not worth bothering to look.
Recruiting firms too, receive massive amounts of resumes each week. And while many firms cover multiple industries and disciplines, their data base is still probably 75% unusable. I know; I was a recruiter for 20 years and was at several firms, both contingency and retained. While it’s possible that some firms download the resumes from services, they simply go right into the database. If you’re thinking the recruiters actually see them and study them when they arrive, you’re wrong.
As a further example, because of my URL and email address, I’m on the list of many of these services. So a few times per week, I get these resumes. I’m not a recruiter. I don’t collect them, send them, or have any interest in them, unless they’re my client, and my clients are job seekers, not employers. So if I’m fooled enough to open the email, once I see what it is, I delete it.
Faxing your resume is no different. Fax spam is almost as insidious as email spam. Roofing companies, mortgage refinancing firms, stock tips, local restaurant menus, it goes on and on. Who looks at the fax spam? It’s usually tossed right in the trash with nary a glance, unless, perhaps, you’re standing there waiting for a fax.
This is what you’re paying for. Your resume is being sent to addresses that aren’t valid and aren’t qualified. It’s being send to, and received by, people who didn’t ask for it, don’t look at it, and don’t care. If it still sounds too good to be true, remember what your mom told you when you were a kid: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. File resume distribution services under that heading.
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