is showing up in person with a resume actually a thing now?

A reader writes:

My brother (Gen Z/millennial cusp) has been out of work (and stuck living back home with my parents) for a while now, and everyone is understandably frustrated with the situation.

A couple times my mom (boomer) and I (millennial) have been one-on-one and she’s brought up the situation, and she’s said that she has told my brother to just “go show up in person to places you’d like to get a job at and try to hand in your resume!”

Every single one of my millennial instincts is screaming NO NO NO, this is CLASSIC out-of-touch boomer advice from when we were trying to get jobs during the Great Recession. I told my mom that yeah, that doesn’t really work now since it’s not the 1980s, and since it’s literally the classic example of out-of-touch boomers with the job hunt, my brother is probably going to then ignore every other piece of advice you give him.

However, my mom’s response was yes, she knows all of that, but she heard recently (like this year) on the news that going in person to hand in your resume out of the blue is actually a good thing now, since it’ll get your resume directly in front of a human and help you avoid the AI filter bots. And she claimed she has a friend whose daughter got her most recent job this way!

Every millennial instinct of mine screams NOPE DISREGARD when I hear this touted as job hunt advice, but I know that the AI filters are so impossible to get past now. Is there actually some merit to it? Has everything I thought I knew about job searching changed in the nine years since I last interviewed?

It is still not a thing.

First, they’re highly likely to just tell you that you need to apply online … because you do in fact need to apply online. As has been the case for a long time now, most organizations use electronic applicant tracking systems. If your application isn’t in there, it’s not getting considered.

Second, with the rise in remote work, a ton of people don’t even work at companies’ main addresses anymore. There may not be anyone involved in hiring for the position even physically there. And even if they’re there, they’re generally going to be very busy and aren’t going to come out and talk to you just because you randomly showed up holding a resume — so anyone you do talk to is incredibly unlikely to have anything to do with hiring for that particular job.

Third, it will still annoy the crap out of most people involved in hiring and make you look naive/out of touch at best … and at worst, like you don’t think instructions apply to you. Their instructions are there for a reason.

You will always hear stories about how one weird job search gimmick worked for someone, but more often than not they’re a bad idea (and the amount of time your brother would put into going door to door with his resume would be far more effective put into networking, or writing a better cover letter, or other things with a bigger pay-off).

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