"Thank you for your interest in a position with our company. We will review your resume and contact you if we believe your background and skills to be a good match with any of our current positions."
Seems pretty impersonal doesn’t it? Especially if you’ve spent anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour laboring to create a shiny profile on a company website, many of which require one to answer sensitive questions like “What do you expect to get paid?” and “Why did you leave your last job?” Those type of inquires are better answered in a personal interview, but if you are unemployed, your have very little leverage. Jobs that require disclosure of Social Security numbers for background check makes one feel very vulnerable. If your unemployed, you must disclose all this information (or at least any blank box marked with a dreaded “*”) to even be considered. After this full disclosure, getting a quick reply that says “We got it” is very unfulfilling.
The automated reply, however, is sometimes very rare. It happens most often when applying via a profile on a company website. When applying for a job posting on craigslist or a company site without profiles, you may never get a reply whatsoever. In some ways, it’s like putting your resume in a bottle, tossing it out to sea and hoping an HR representative on a distant island will pick up the bottle and read the details of your professional background. That’s assuming, of course, that a human scans your resume. Most of the time, a talent acquisition software program is examining your credentials. Keywords matter. Fonts don’t.
The job application process has become incredibly de-humanzing. Networking certainly helps the process, but hiring mangers rarely attend job search groups. Unemployment is about disconnection. Getting a job is about re-connection. In this age of social media, there’s got to be a better to way to communicate other than an automated email response.