Does it feel like you’re competing with dozens of  people every time you compete for a job?  If so, this is for you.

The Fearless Competitor spoke with top experts, like Kathy Simmons,  CEO of Netshare, Marc Hovind, CEO of JobBait, Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies and an executive recruiter named Jerry Recht.  What was the common theme of all?  The broken hiring process.

Jerry even said distilling an experienced human being into two flat pages was a waste of time.  Paper documents do not resemble living, breathing people.

Think about it.  A company has an opening, so we call and inquire about the position.  What are we asked to do?  “Please email your  resume/CV to Human Resources at [email protected].”

If you do what they ask, you just went to the Land of No Return.  You joined a proverbial flood of resumes and you will never get a call.

How it the process broken?  A job search is nothing more than a sales process.  I have to say that again.  A job search is nothing more than a sales process.

No salesperson worth his or her salt would ever blindly send brochures to Purchasing.  But that is exactly what job seekers do every day.

Sending a resume (brochure) about a product (the person and her skills) to Human Resources (the group that does the purchasing of job candidates.), is the same hopeless process.  It is a mistake repeated millions of times a day.

With high unemployment, companies are flooded with resumes — and as Jerry told me, companies simply use them as a filter, weeding out all but the most obvious — and as a result throw out wheat with the chaff.  Even great candidates miss out if you don’t have the spot on perfect experience (Typically having had the same job for their direct competitor.)

Want a great example of how this process would miss great candidates?   My boss in the 1980’s was Bob Greifeld.  Bob spent his entire career in technology companies.  So what job did he win and he excelled at for the last decade?

Robert Greifeld is President and CEO of NASDAQ/OMX.  By any measure, Bob has been a superb CEO.  But if one looks at him through a traditional resume process — he would never have been considered. He never worked in finance.  He never worked for an exchange.

Kudos to the NASDAQ Board of Directors for a smart and creative choice!

The entire hiring process is fundamentally broken and hopelessly degrading — as the job seeker blasts out more and more brochures (resumes) in the faint and pointless hope someone notices.  Companies miss out on potential superstars while job seekers grow desperate.

It is time for radical change!

Jill Konrath and I are doing something about it.  Our initiative, Get Back to Work Faster, teaches professional job seekers:

• How to package their presence — with a killer website, a thought leadership blog and a strong LinkedIn profile.
• Add a video introduction on their website, so they can, in the words of Mark Hovind of JobBait, “interview in their sleep.”
• Learn how to target companies and get in at the highest levels.
• Stop asking for a job —  to win a job.

Best of all, the content is free (except for small fee for the book to cover costs.).  Go to Get Back to Work Faster now and sign up.

And if you want to see the example of what is possible, please visit Fearless Competitor, JeffreyOgden and my LinkedIn profile.