With jobs hard to come by and the number of people seeking jobs rising continually, job-hunting is becoming an agonizingly painful ordeal. Since there are thousands applying for the few openings, more often than not, job-hunting hits a dead-end, unproductive and wasted.

Strangely instead of being sympathetic to the plight of the jobless, a survey suggests that there is an pandemic of rudeness amongst the employers, even among companies that are supposed to great places to work in.

Moreover, the study found that the online hiring process that these employers use is not easing the problem but compounding it.

An experiment conducted by the staffing industry consulting firm CareerXRoads, created a resume for an imaginary job-hunter, they named Charles Brown. They then selected a list of open positions in companies that had made it to the Fortune 2012 list of ‘Best Companies To Work For’ and sent the resume to them.

The companies included such illustrious names as Google, Zappos, Whole Foods, and Goldman Sachs.

The results of the survey, which incidentally the company has been conducting for the last decade, revealed that even companies that were supposedly adept at customer service treated job candidates with scant respect.

In their study CareerXRoads’ co-founders Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler wrote, that research revealed that there was a marked difference in what the leading companies professed and what they practiced. “Leading companies believe they excel in recruiting candidates quickly, efficiently and respectfully via their websites.” The reality, however, is far different, they found.

Facing criticism and facing the attention that the study has brought in its wake, the process has shown signs of improvement, but the authors of the study found that there were far too many cases of resumes entering a “black hole” and that employers showed appallingly pitiable conduct.

Other things that the study identified were that the online applications were very hard to navigate. They make things unnecessary complicated and “Only about one-third of the time did Brown find passage between the home and careers pages ‘instinctive’ and ‘a pleasure,’ ” the report said.

Furthermore the online applications took too long to fill. In 28 percent of the cases, Brown found that he was unable to upload the resume. In 8 percent of the cases, it actually took an hour to compete the online application. Moreover, in some cases, the fictitious applicant Brown had to type it in or ‘answer questions, cutting and pasting.’

What was frustrating was the many employers did not bother to acknowledge the applications, whilst others responded with “cursory or canned responses.”

A major portion of the companies, top tier companies, where work was, supposedly, a pleasure for the employees, did not inform Brown that he was not selected and that his qualifications did not merit the job. This, the authors conclude, “indicates that most companies still lack a basic understanding of how they should be managing candidates. His resume entered a black hole.”

Of the companies two companies behaved in a courteous manner, worthy of their stature. Zappos and financial services firm USAA, granted Brown permission to check on the status of his application. REI, the outdoor clothing retailer, was the only company that actually called and told Brown that they had received his resume. “We want the candidate experience to be representative of how we treat our customers, and we put a huge emphasis on customers,” said REI recruiting supervisor Lisa Arbacauskas.

The study reveals that in a employer friendly market the jobless have to resign to the fact that they may face scorn and derision at potential workplaces but they must not allow that to dishearten them or lessen their quest for the hitherto elusive job.

With jobs hard to come by and the number of people seeking jobs rising continually, job-hunting is becoming an agonizingly painful ordeal. Since there are thousands applying for the few openings, more often than not, job-hunting hits a dead-end, unproductive and wasted.

Strangely instead of being sympathetic to the plight of the jobless, a survey suggests that there is an pandemic of rudeness amongst the employers, even among companies that are supposed to great places to work in.

Moreover, the study found that the online hiring process that these employers use is not easing the problem but compounding it.

An experiment conducted by the staffing industry consulting firm CareerXRoads, created a resume for an imaginary job-hunter, they named Charles Brown. They then selected a list of open positions in companies that had made it to the Fortune 2012 list of ‘Best Companies To Work For’ and sent the resume to them.

The companies included such illustrious names as Google, Zappos, Whole Foods, and Goldman Sachs.

The results of the survey, which incidentally the company has been conducting for the last decade, revealed that even companies that were supposedly adept at customer service treated job candidates with scant respect.

In their study CareerXRoads’ co-founders Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler wrote, that research revealed that there was a marked difference in what the leading companies professed and what they practiced. “Leading companies believe they excel in recruiting candidates quickly, efficiently and respectfully via their websites.” The reality, however, is far different, they found.

Facing criticism and facing the attention that the study has brought in its wake, the process has shown signs of improvement, but the authors of the study found that there were far too many cases of resumes entering a “black hole” and that employers showed appallingly pitiable conduct.

Other things that the study identified were that the online applications were very hard to navigate. They make things unnecessary complicated and “Only about one-third of the time did Brown find passage between the home and careers pages ‘instinctive’ and ‘a pleasure,’ ” the report said.

Furthermore the online applications took too long to fill. In 28 percent of the cases, Brown found that he was unable to upload the resume. In 8 percent of the cases, it actually took an hour to compete the online application. Moreover, in some cases, the fictitious applicant Brown had to type it in or ‘answer questions, cutting and pasting.’

What was frustrating was the many employers did not bother to acknowledge the applications, whilst others responded with “cursory or canned responses.”

A major portion of the companies, top tier companies, where work was, supposedly, a pleasure for the employees, did not inform Brown that he was not selected and that his qualifications did not merit the job. This, the authors conclude, “indicates that most companies still lack a basic understanding of how they should be managing candidates. His resume entered a black hole.”

Of the companies two companies behaved in a courteous manner, worthy of their stature. Zappos and financial services firm USAA, granted Brown permission to check on the status of his application. REI, the outdoor clothing retailer, was the only company that actually called and told Brown that they had received his resume.“We want the candidate experience to be representative of how we treat our customers, and we put a huge emphasis on customers,” said REI recruiting supervisor Lisa Arbacauskas.