It used to be that if you needed a job, you’d pick up the local (or national) paper and look through the classifieds.  If you find one you feel your suited for, you pick up the telephone, or mail in your resume.

Ah, those were the times.  When you thought you stood a good chance of getting an interview, or at the very least, a reply.

The internet has changed all that.

Now, you access a site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com to sort through and find hundreds, if not thousands of jobs you feel you might enjoy and qualify for.  The problem is, many thousands of other job seekers are seeing the same job listings.

The fact is, the internet has made it so easy to go find a job that it has made getting hired even harder.  On top of that, smaller Human Resources departments now have to deal with thousands of resumes for a particular job instead of just a handful.

Effectively the ‘net has turned the job seeking game into one of timing, rather than qualification.  An overwhelmed HR department will start at the top of a tall stack of resumes and work their way down until they find someone who, on paper, meets the criteria for a particular job.  Unless they have a lot of time to sort through ALL of the resumes, yours will never be seen, even though you may be the most qualified with the optimum level of experience.

Liz Ryan is an HR person and writes a ‘Recruiting Strategies‘ column for BusinessWeek.  A recent article covers this topic well, and her comments on how HR departments deal with applicants hold a great deal of truth.

Today if you apply for a job, you might get a reply, you might not. You might get a canned form letter or email along the lines of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”.

In other words: “We’re too busy to discuss your qualifications, but if you’re lucky, your resume isn’t too far down on the stack”.

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