By Carl Mueller   »   Resume distribution services - unheard of until a couple of years ago - are starting to pop up all over the place, and some job searchers have asked me about whether or not they are worth using.

Essentially, you pay the company a fee and they will send your resume to hundreds if not thousands of employers and recruiters. The idea is that they put your resume in front of numerous people who may be interested in speaking with you regarding employment.

The apparent benefit to you is that it would take far too long for you to blast your resume out to thousands of people and that a resume distribution service can do it far quicker than you could.

Is a resume distribution service worth using?

Let’s put it this way: if you believe in the old adage that if you throw enough you-know-what against a wall, something is bound to stick…..then perhaps using a resume distribution service makes sense to you.

That’s basically what this sort of service does.

The underlying principle seems to be that if you float your resume past enough people, someone is bound to want to hire you!

If you were looking for a date, would you email everyone in your email contacts list asking them if they know anyone you could go out with? That would smack of desperation, wouldn’t it? Probably wouldn’t work either.

Using a resume distribution service might sound like something that makes sense in theory but if you think about it, it’s basically just a form of legal spamming.

They email your resume to a group of people you don’t know and who don’t know you and the idea that they will spend time to read over each resume they receive hoping to find a good one is unrealistic.

As a recruiter, whenever I receive a resume from someone that I know has been emailed to numerous other recruiters, I usually glance at the resume quickly and then delete it.

If a resume has been sent to hundreds or thousands of other people, why would I bother trying to help this person with their job search when I’d be competing with all the other people who also have their resume?

A recruiter who largely relies on resume distribution services to find job candidates is probably not a very good recruiter. And an employer who relies on such a service to find staff is probably looking for staff on a regular basis and is really just looking for warm bodies to fill some seats.

Your resume has value. By allowing a company to send it off to thousands of people generically, you simply reduce the value of your resume by using a method that will most likely yield low results.

A targeted job search that uses your resume for specific job opportunities that ideally gets sent to a specific person is your best long-term plan.