> You go to some jobs website. You click the button that says "apply", and 
> it tells you "your CV has been forwarded".

Fail!  You should check and double check the job description and update your 
CV to match before applying to each job.  Simply sending an exact copy of 
the same CV to everywhere that sounds interesting is a recipe for failure. 
Also I see a lot of jobs are advertised through agencies, sometimes several 
agencies will be advertising the same job, it's worth applying through *all* 
the agencies for the same job (in this case obviously you can post the exact 
same CV and cover letter).

> You never hear back. What else can you do?

If you are sure your CV is the best it can be then just keep searching and 
apply for more jobs.  More jobs come up daily so don't worry.  You can get 
monster.co.uk to automatically email you new jobs that match your criteria 
every day, very useful.

> "We're working on it." Seriously, what more can you actually do?

Apply for more jobs.

>   "We will accept anybody who applies."
>
> Sure, seems completely plausible to me. :-P

Depends who else has applied.  When we were trying to get an Engineer for 
our office here in Munich we had to work really hard to just find 4 or 5 
people to bring in for interview, this was after having advertised on 
monster.de and in several newspapers.  None of the ones we interviewed were 
particularly great (an electrical engineer who has never used an 
oscilloscope, wtf!), we had to take someone as we desperately needed another 
person - in the end our company got a recruitment freeze just before we were 
about to offer him the job!

> The above makes it perfectly clear that they *expect* a PhD before they'll 
> even bother to speak to you - or at the worst, you should have truly 
> exceptional degree grades. I have neither. They're going to have an 
> electronic system to automatically filter out anything that doesn't say 
> "PhD" on it somewhere. My CV will never even be seen by a human being.

If they are willing to accept people without a PhD then it's not going to 
automatically filter out people without a PhD is it?  Anyway, depending on 
the number of people who apply, every single one might well be read by a 
Real Person.

> I might as well go apply to be the CEO of Sony BMG. I'd have as much 
> chance of success.

Now for that job your CV is definitely completely wrong.  By a very very 
long way.

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