They say that people who work in restaurants are very careful about eating out. They know what goes on behind the scenes. I worked in a huge banquet restaurant during high school and I saw things that would make you decide never to eat in a restaurant again.

It’s no different in the corporate world. I worked in HR for twenty years and I know that what might look from the outside like a well-oiled machine is a hot mess held together by chewing gum and rubber bands.

It’s not just a waste of your time to apply for jobs online. It actually hurts you, and here’s why.

When a hiring manager asks an HR person or internal recruiter to post a job opening, they specify lots of Essential Requirements. Most of these requirements, are course, are more fanciful than essential.

If you told me “I want you to make a list of the clothes and accessories you have to have in order to be well-dressed,” I’d give you a list of at least ten thousand dollars’ worth of great stuff – and why not?

I get to write the list, so I’m going to go to town! I’m going to tell you that I need this handbag and that fancy hair accessory and who knows what — after all, you gave me carte blanche to decide what I “need!”

I don’t really need any of that stuff, and hiring managers don’t really need most of the Essential Job Requirements they include on their job specs.

Hiring managers who don’t have level-headed and self-confident HR colleagues to set them straight routinely write job specs that no living person could fulfill.

Yet when you apply for one of these jobs, the first thing that happens to your online application and/or resume is that it gets searched for the same keywords that appeared in the job ad.

Since most people can read, and they know how to cut and paste from one document to another, the vast majority of job-seekers have learned to cut and paste verbiage from the job ad into their resumes. They figure “This will get me through the keyword-searching filter” and they are right!

That means that nearly everyone who applies for a job passes the keyword test. What do HR folks do then, since they can’t interview 100 people? They add more keywords to their screening processes – new keywords that weren’t in the job ad!

This is an idiotic practice, but when you see people-intensive projects like recruiting as sorting and matching exercises the way far too many recruiting departments do, you might think that searching applications using more and more obscure keywords is a great idea.

Because you are not a mind-reader, you’re not going to have anticipated the “secret” words and phrases that people are using to screen the heap of resumes they received in response to their job ad.

Now you’re going to get a “no thank you” message in response to your job application, even though you could perform the job in your sleep.

In fact,  you’ll  be among the lucky few if you hear anything back from the employer at all!

If you recover your mojo at that moment and write a Pain Letter to send directly to your hiring manager, you’re too late — the excited manager who carries your Pain Letter down the hall to HR, saying “I want to interview this person!” will be told “You can’t — this applicant was already Rejected By The System.”

If you want to get a good job, you have to stop lobbing applications into automated recruiting sites. You have to step outside the lines and reach out to your hiring manager directly. It’s not hard to do.

Here’s how to find your department manager. Here’s how to write the letter, called a Pain Letter, that you will send to him or her.

It’s a new day in the talent market.

People who make their own way will thrive while Sheepie Job Seekers will wait months to get wan rejection notices that will pour salt in another old wound. You can step outside the lines and try a new job-search approach.

You only have to remember this: Only the people who get you, deserve you!