A client worked 8 hours on her cover letter and her application was rejected in 4 minutes.

Let’s agree that no human eyes saw her materials.

She THINKS that it is because she created her resume in a program that is standard for her field but not Microsoft Word or a pdf.

It’s a guess.

I suggested we test it by having her create a new gmail account, and submit a new application with a pdf resume.

Next roadblock.

She says that the hiring manager’s email address are not given anywhere public, so she doesn’t know how to follow up.

A possible solution – most companies use a standard email naming process.

FirstInitialLastName@, FirstName_LastName@, FirstName@ (only used in small companies).

You’ve seen it, you can guess the patterns as well as I can.

If you send it off and it goes to the wrong person, you can be pretty sure that it is not the first time Elizabeth Huggins got Edward Huggins’ message. She will either reply to you with the right email, forward it, or both.

All of these are ways of gaming the system that is designed to keep humans from having to interact with each other.

If you want to play that game, there are tricks.

What if you play a completely different game. One where you don’t spend 8 hours of your life writing a document that if you are lucky will get 15 seconds in front of a human?

Here’s my calendar, if you want to talk about how: cal.com/amandagustafson/30min