Are you responding to online job posts? If so, you’re one in a million respondents and yes, a far-away address might scare some hiring managers off.
I’d guess that, as usually is the case, you’d be better off identifying those in a hiring position at firms near where you want to work—and then reaching out to them directly. A letter or email with a follow up call would be the way to go. Even if they aren’t hiring immediately, they may be open to your coming in to chat with them about opportunities in the area. Perhaps they’d then be willing to refer you to other local companies as well. You never can tell.
If the WVa area is where you want to be, you’re not employed elsewhere and you already have local property, why don’t you just move there and conduct your search more locally? I can’t imagine you’d find too many other places with a lower cost of living.
I’ve always read and heard that a resume needs to be short and to the point. I’ve considered trimming my own resume down by leaving off older positions and non experience related information.
Good luck.
Call the local hiring manager and drop your resume USPS...
Online portals are haystacks...
If the job has not been filled for a year I’d wonder how vital and therefore secure the job is in the first place.
Also, you are assuming that the hiring manager or HR person is actually thinking about this position or much of anything else. Then there is the factor of people not taking adds down after filling the job. We see that all the time.
Other than that, there isn't much advice to give. Unless you personally know a hiring manager at your target company, there isn't any real way to get noticed as an outsider. In the tech field, companies are very well aware that after 40 most human beings' ability to calculate and learn new things has already slowed down dramatically. They are aware of the productivity arbitrage they gain from having a cheaper 25-year-old (or H1B candidate) with something to prove do the work instead of a complacent 40-year-old. They are aware of how much more the 40-year-old's health benefits are going to cost them. They are aware that in an emergency the 40-year-old will be at his son's baseball game and unavailable to come in and spend 12 hours rebuilding a crashed database server.
These aren't factors that even the most capable 40-year-old can easily overcome without inside connections or a high profile industry image (being a published author or noted consultant, for example). A rockstar coder at Microsoft might still get hired away by Google at age 40, for example, but a run-of-the-mill 40-year-old "IT Guy" is not of any interest to a firm which does not already have some sort of personal connection to him.
By one's 40's, one needs to have made the transition to consulting or running one's own business. "Jobs" in these times are essentially apprenticeships for younger people. Only a very few can make the transition into higher management roles and survive past 40 these days. The others have to prepare for life on their own, and - sadly - only a small fraction of corporate employees are actually doing that. In a way, it's Logan's Run come to life.
Radical idea: Start your own business.
Since it is a small target market you are aiming for, why not visit your local property and deliver the resume in person. That may actually get you a shot at an on-the-spot interview, or at least, the hiring manager can ask the employee that received the resume, what did the person look like and perhaps get an answer of “very businesslike.”
Applications are supposed to be read and evaluated on only the qualifications, but sober, businesslike and professional people can’t hide that asset.
It is not dishonest to use the address where you will be living. I don't even think you need to put an address on the resume. Your phone number and email address are fine. Getting responses to advertised jobs is a needle in a haystack. My recommendation would be to move there and take a contract position that might become permanent.
Good luck to you.
Resume example:
Experience
Blah blah: 5 years
Yadda yadda: 8 years
Hoo hoo: 3 years
Employers
2010-present: Company 1
2008-2010: Company 2
2000-2008: Company 3.
Education
B.S. University of Something
Certifications:
Network blah blah
Security yadda
Make sure you complete work history but don’t spend a lot of time in your resume on those outside the realm of the company in which you are applying. Give lots of info that are relevant to the position.
When you upload a resume to an employers job board, the ATS parses the text looking for keywords and job description matches. If the "score" isn't high enough your resume will never make it to the hiring manager or department head.
I'm a 58 year old Network/Systems/Security Admin that recently had to go through all this after 15 years at one company. I finally got hired after 5 months out of work. Here's some advice:
-Tailor your resume to each employers' job description. Use the exact same descriptions for skills they require.
-Don't upload your resume in PDF format. I'm told that ATS's don't like that format. Use Rich Text Format instead.
-Network with people. Get on LinkedIn and upload your resume. Search for others in your field in the city you want to be in and contact them. This is a biggie. I made some good contacts.
-Join some professional association chapters in the region you want to go to.
Good luck!
My guess is its either the salary or too much experience. They may be thinking you wouldn’t stay long.
You probably have more experience then the people doing the hiring. They may also be worried you would take their job.
I should also mentioned that I’ve put my resume into the web sites of all the standard staffing firms - Mancan, Kelly, Manpower, etc. One of them did have a direct hire job I was looking into awhile back.
I have several local recruiters who call me on a regular basis, but none of them cover the WV areas and neither do their companies. I have yet to find an actual recruiter in the Parkersburg area to work with, although they’ve never gotten me a job in the past.
A lot of tech job postings that go unfilled are for show to justify an H-1B hire.
Also, many job boards are recycling older ads in order to look healthy.
I was laid off two weeks before Christmas. I have sent out over 500 resumes and job applications. I had very few responses other than auto bots, "Thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move in a different direction."
Most don't reply at all.
When I could, I would call the HR dept and inquire. Quite a few were surprised that there was an employment ad running.
I'm in sales. I can sell an empty book of matches to an arsonist. I'm that good.
I finally found a terrific sales job on of all places, Craigslist. No resume. No application. Just a phone call for a face to face. NO HR. Just the owner. Interview lasted all of ten minutes.
I start Tuesday.
Here is my story:
When the Shuttle program ended I got laid-off. I was over 55. I had been a Rendezvous software systems engineer for nearly a dozen years and had started on the Shuttle program back in 1979. There was no demand for space navigation types.
So, I spent the last three years unemployed right? Or at least underemployed.
Nope. I had a new job, in a different field and at the same salary within a month of layoff.
How did I do it?
First, I found the intersection of what I liked to do, what I was good at, and what there was a demand for. That proved to be tech writing.
I put together a one-page resume highlighting my tech writing experience over 30 years. One page. That’s it.
I included everything that would make someone hiring a tech writer salivate, and left *everything* else out.
I also put the resume in terms of what benefit the employer would get by hiring me, rather than extolling my accomplishments. The employer didn’t care about my awards - just how I made his life easier.
If you cannot capture the attention of a hiring manager in the first half-page of your resume he or she isn’t going to bother with the rest of it — whether the rest is half a page or ten pages. So, why bother with a multi-page “ain’t I wonderful?” resume.
I got my last few jobs from being involved in User Groups and giving presentations, usually companies send representatives to these meetings and if you impress, you can easily find a job.
Unless it is a tiny company, resumes today are all prefiltered. Maybe your resume is poorly formatted for automated reading.
I think the biggest negative I see is that 25 years is considered too old. 25 years experience is OK for a senior executive, but is a big negative for anything below that.
You need to remove as best as possible any reference to your age and experience in years.