7 Reasons Why No One Is Hiring You

Searching for a new job and applying for it is a stressful experience for most of us. You spend days drafting the best resume in the entire world and sending it out to your favorite companies. Some lucky people get hired fast. But what do you do when all you keep hearing are cricket sounds?

The first thing you should understand is that no two people’s hiring story is similar. Your friend might slap together a resume in 15 minutes and score an interview when you write yours for 6 hours and still hear nothing. Someone else you know might start on their second job while you’re still at home yelling “Why?” at your laptop.

There can be a lot of reasons why you’re not getting interviews for your job applications. We plan to explore 7 of them with this article along with advice on what you should do to remedy the issue. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

1. Your resume and the job description are miles apart

This may seem a piece of quite common advice repeated on every resume site on the world wide web but matching your resume to the job description is a must when you apply for a new job. A lot of employers use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) to sort through the staggering number of candidates they get for job postings. If you don’t tailor your resume to each and every job you apply for, the ATS will rank your resume among the lowest. Your resume will be rejected before a human ever even glances at it.

2. You don’t follow up on your job applications

You’ve sent out an application to a position that you’re dying to get with radio silence for a week. You have two options to deal with it now, give up on the job or contact the HR team to ask about the progress. If you keep taking the first option all the time, you’d probably never get hired. Instead, show some proactiveness by reaching out to the company and asking about your application. If they haven’t noticed you until then, they sure would take note after that.

3. You haven’t asked your network for help

A lot of people score interviews by asking their network for help with their job search. Your college professors, entrepreneur relatives, previous bosses, or working friends are all great assets in the job search. If you talk to them about your situation, one of them might even recommend you for a position that just opened up! Even if they don’t go to great lengths to pull strings for you, your network can alert you about promising job postings they come across.

4. You only applied for the one job

Being confident in your ability to score an interview is a good thing. However, you are more likely to fail in your job search if you don’t apply for a considerable number of jobs. You can never predict the stability of a company hiring policies. Some companies may decide to hire internally for a job posting without updating the advert. After all, what do you have to lose by sending in a resume to 20-30 companies?

5. Your resume isn’t up to the mark

Your resume is the window to your entire professional history. If your resume is haphazardly done without a proper structure or flow, you might get rejected in the first rounds of screening. You can run a spell and grammar checker on your resume and ask a family member or friend to read it before you send it out to notice any errors. Always make sure that your resume is a top-quality product with zero errors or mistakes.

6. You haven’t added the right skills to your resume

It doesn’t matter how great your resume looks if you haven’t added the skills the employer is expecting from you in it. Always use keywords from the job description to guide your skills section. And don’t go about adding quirky terms to describe your skills. Use the proper technical terminology that the ATS is most likely to parse.

7. Your timing isn’t ideal

You are in a rush to get out of your current workplace and into a new one before the new year. So you start applying for jobs around thanksgiving. Your plan to start a new job is a good one. The problem is with the timing. The end of the year is a busy time for many companies. The holiday season is approaching, and the offices are understaffed. There are tons of emails circulating about Christmas parties and new years eve celebrations causing your job application to get piled over. Therefore, when you apply for a new position, consider the busy seasons for the business.