For those wondering what the latest trends in job hunting are, this is what I've been seing:

-Email screenings to determine if there's going to be a phone screening to determine if an actual in-person interview will happen. Sadly, none of the "How to Get a Job" books detail what you are and are not supposed to do on an email prescreen.

-Outsourced recruiters. Yep, that's right. I think some of the recruiters with whom I've talked to are in Bombay not in San Francisco. I could be wrong but I've gotten way too many calls from recruiters with thick Indian accents coming from all sorts of weird area codes. There is a certain irony, however, to the fact that people who help people who've been outsourced look for new work are getting outsourced themselves.

-Long, drawn out processes. Usually, if a company needs to hire somebody, they like to do it ASAP. This doesn't stop them from taking several weeks in between going from one part of the interview process (the prescreening) to the second part of the process. Of course, this could be because they didn't really like you that much and are just telling you that or it could mean that they're just so busy they don't even have time to hire somebody to help them be less busy but it could also mean that they've received so many resumes over the past few weeks that they're going to be really, really, really choosy. Why just talk to several people when you talk to 30 of them?