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By JONNELLE MARTE

(Corrections & Amplifications:)

There’s a youth movement brewing in the franchising world.

Usually, franchisers don’t want to gamble on young entrepreneurs—they prefer seasoned managers who have built up lots of savings to plow into the venture. Now a host of companies are rethinking that logic. They’re aggressively recruiting twentysomethings through franchise brokers, marketing themselves in youth-friendly venues like Facebook, and in some cases offering financial lures to get young people on board—such as deep discounts on franchise fees, which many beginners can’t afford.

A Foot in the Door

Why the big change? For one thing, many boomer franchisees are retiring, leaving room for newcomers. And many franchisers say that today’s crop of twentysomethings are much better prepared to run a business than earlier generations of youngsters, since more colleges are offering strong training in entrepreneurship.

Then there’s attitude. “Sometimes the younger people have more drive and are willing to put in more time and maybe are hungrier than a corporate person who has other commitments,” says Patty Meyer, a senior consultant for Toronto-based MatchPoint Franchise Consulting Network, which helps companies recruit franchisees. “Younger people are able to get things moving faster in some cases.”

As baby boomers retire, franchisers are aggressively recruiting a much younger crowd like 23-year-old Nicholas Hernandez. If he hits his sales targets, he’ll get a break on the fee for opening a franchise. WSJ’s Jonnelle Marte reports.

Of course, in these tough times, franchisers are offering lots of people discounts to get them to buy into the business, not just twentysomethings. But many franchisers and brokers say they’re making a particular effort to bring in young people. Several franchise companies, for instance, say they have joined the Veterans Transition Franchise Initiative, known as VetFran, in order to attract young veterans. The program, created by The International Franchise Association and promoted by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nonprofit Veterans Corporation and the U.S. Small Business Administration, aims to help veterans of all ages by giving them a discount off initial franchise fees of member companies—usually between 10% and 15%.

Other companies are using different incentives to get twentysomethings on board. Consider Valpak Direct Marketing Systems Inc., a direct-mailing company in Largo, Fla., owned by a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc. Last year, Valpak created the Entrepreneurship Award Program in an effort to recruit young people who could open new franchises or take over existing ones as owners prepare to retire. The potential franchisees sign on with the company as salespeople, and if they hit certain goals they get a discount on their franchise fee. Along the way, they get to know the business and the company gets a sense of how they perform.

One hopeful is Nicholas Hernandez. At 23, he has already opened—and closed down—his first start-up, a music-promotion company. He wants to run a franchise, but for now, short on cash and experience, he’s a salesman.

If he brings in $1.1 million in three years—the average sales raked in by the top third of the company’s performers over the past three years—Mr. Hernandez becomes eligible for one of three things: $50,000 toward the fees for one of Valpak’s dormant territories, which start around $43,000 but range higher as the market size increases; $10,000 toward the franchise fee of an International Franchise Association member company; or $10,000 toward an M.B.A. or other advanced degree.

“Quite frankly, sharp people coming out of school have choices, and so we’re trying to give them a reason to at least consider us,” says Joe Bourdow, president of Valpak, which has about 170 franchises in the U.S. and Canada. He started the program after visiting colleges and finding himself impressed by the students he met.

Hunting for Talent

Another company aggressively looking for young people is WSI, an Internet-marketing franchiser with 1,500 franchisees in 87 countries. In 2007, the company launched the Young Entrepreneur Scholarship Program, which awards franchises—minus the initial fee—to people between 21 and 31 years old. Candidates must propose a business plan for how they would run the franchise and are also judged on their community involvement, education and personality.

Company executives say they need tech-savvy franchisees who can help the company stay on top of the latest technology. “If we can help capture some of the young talent and bring them to WSI franchising, then we’re really meeting the needs…of bringing in the innovation needed to develop the business,” says Maribel Guiste, vice president of franchise operations for WSI.

So far, only one WSI scholarship has been awarded—in Latin America—but the company plans to select two recipients in North America by the end of September. Overall, 13% of the Toronto-based company’s franchisees are younger than 30, up from 2% in 2006.

Other companies aren’t offering inducements but are still pushing heavily to land young entrepreneurs. For instance, many companies are telling their franchise brokers to pursue the demographic. David Omholt, a franchise broker in Plano, Texas, says about a third of the 200 companies he works with have stopped giving age ranges for their target franchisee and are changing their marketing materials to minimize jargon and depict franchisees of all ages. “It’s quite a departure from the traditional mentality of who to recruit and how to recruit for new franchisees,” says Mr. Omholt.

Rich Wilson, chief operating officer of CertaPro Painters, an Oaks, Pa., painting franchiser with over 300 locations in the U.S. and Canada, had a similar chat with his franchise brokers earlier this year. Mr. Wilson also joined VetFran, in an effort to recruit young veterans who may have saved some money while they were deployed. “We have people [ages] 25, 26 and 30 coming in and earning better numbers than our more mature franchisees,” says Mr. Wilson, adding that about 15% of the franchisees CertaPro recruited recently are younger than 35, up from 10% six years ago.

A Risky Bet?

Still, this new focus on youth carries some risks, particularly when incentive programs are involved. Some franchise consultants warn that these programs might attract franchisees who don’t fight as hard because they’re not investing as much of their own money or who might not have the finances to cover regular business expenses.

“The real risk is that you end up bringing on a marginal franchisee that is going to cost you more and return less,” says Mark Siebert, chief executive officer of iFranchise Group Inc., a franchise-consulting company based in Homewood, Ill.

Some experts worry that a younger person buying a franchise might have a hard time hiring, managing and firing employees—difficult tasks for even seasoned businesspeople. But some of these programs, like Valpak’s, address that issue by allowing for a test run of sorts, where the candidate and company get to know each other.

At Valpak, Mr. Hernandez sits down once a week with his boss and mentor, Bobby Coco, to decide what neighborhoods to target and what companies to follow up with. Mr. Coco also shares what he’s learned in 35 years of running Valpak franchises. How to meet press deadlines and set realistic goals. How to approach potential clients. How to convert that burning desire into success.

Mr. Hernandez, who graduated last year from William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., says the structure and financial help the program offers make his entrepreneurship goals much more achievable.

“Having to deal with my own business and having to set up my own reputation, my own brand name—it’s very difficult,” he says.

Mr. Coco says programs like this were unheard of when he opened his first franchise at age 21—a move he could afford only because he convinced the owner at the time to give him a payment plan. “We really weren’t handed the opportunity; we had to stick it out ourselves,” he says. “We’re at least giving them the opportunity, but they still have to earn it.”

Corrections & Amplifications:

The International Franchise Association created, and runs, the Veterans Transition Franchise Initiative, which aims to help veterans start franchises. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that VetFran was created by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the nonprofit Veterans Corporation and the Small Business Administration, which promote the program.

–Ms. Marte is a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal in South Brunswick, N.J. She can be reached at jonnelle.marte@wsj.com.

By LAUREN WEBER

Many job seekers have long suspected their online employment applications disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. Their fears may not be far off the mark, as more companies rely on technology to winnow out less-qualified candidates.

Recruiters and hiring managers are overwhelmed by the volume of résumés pouring in, thanks to the weak job market and new tools that let applicants apply for a job with as little as one mouse click. The professional networking website LinkedIn recently introduced an “apply now” button on its job postings that sends the data in a job seeker’s profile directly to a potential employer.

While job boards and networking websites help companies broadcast openings to a wide audience, potentially increasing the chance the perfect candidate will reply, the resulting flood of applications tends to include a lot of duds. Most recruiters report that at least 50% of job hunters don’t possess the basic qualifications for the jobs they are pursuing.

To cut through the clutter, many large and midsize companies have turned to applicant-tracking systems to search résumés for the right skills and experience. The systems, which can cost from $5,000 to millions of dollars, are efficient, but not foolproof.

Ed Struzik, an International Business Machines Corp. expert on the systems, puts the proportion of large companies using them in the “high 90%” range, and says it would “be very rare to find a Fortune 500 company without one.”

At many large companies the tracking systems screen out about half of all résumés, says John Sullivan, a management professor at San Francisco State University.

What happens to a resume after it’s submitted online? Job seekers who apply to positions online complain that they rarely even receive a confirmation, let alone a personal response. Lauren Weber has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images

No wonder: Starbucks Corp. attracted 7.6 million job applicants over the past 12 months for about 65,000 corporate and retail job openings; Procter & Gamble Inc. got nearly a million applications last year for 2,000 new positions plus vacant jobs. Both companies use the systems.

Although they originally evolved to help employers scan paper résumés into a database, do basic screening and trace an applicant’s path through the interview and hiring process, today’s tracking systems are programmed to scan for keywords, former employers, years of experience and schools attended to identify candidates of likely interest. Then, they rank the applicants. Those with low scores generally don’t make it to the next round.

The screening systems are one way companies are seeking to cut the costs of hiring a new employee, which now averages $3,479, according to human-resources consulting firm Bersin & Associates. Big companies, many of which cut their human-resources staffs during the recession, now spend about 7% of their external recruitment budgets on applicant-tracking systems, the firm says.

At PNC Financial Services Group, which has used the tracking software for 15 years, an applicant for a bank-teller job is filtered out if his résumé doesn’t indicate that he has two to three years of cash-handling experience. PNC emails rejected applicants within a day, suggesting they search its website for jobs for which they are better qualified, says Jillian Snavely, senior recruiting manager.

A recruiter reviews applicants who make it through the first cut, which includes the résumé screening and a brief questionnaire about relevant skills. Those applicants get a live or automated phone interview.

Tracking software has its pitfalls. It may miss the most-qualified applicant if that person doesn’t game the system by larding his or her résumé with keywords from the job description, according to Mark Mehler, co-founder of consulting firm Career Xroads, which advises companies on staffing.

But the idea isn’t to replace human screeners entirely. Experts say the systems simply narrow the field to a size hiring managers can handle. They also stress that, despite advances in the software, the single best method of getting a job remains a referral from a company employee.

One small error, such as listing the name of a former employer after the years worked there, instead of before, can ruin a great candidate’s chances.

“There are some things parsers are just too stupid to figure out,” says Bersin & Associates Chief Executive Josh Bersin. And they do add to job seekers’ impression that submitting applications online is largely futile, even after that person customizes a résumé for a job that seems a natural fit.

“I kind of wonder if some of the jobs I’m applying to even exist,” says Asa Denton, a 31-year-old software programmer in Reno, Nev., who has been job hunting for four months.

Elaine Orler, president of Talent Function Group LLC and an expert on the tracking systems, says they should be more candidate-friendly. In the future, she says, forward-thinking companies will allow applicants to check the status of their applications online. The bottom line, she adds: “Candidates deserve respect.”

For all their flaws, recruiters generally prefer the automated systems. Texas Roadhouse Inc., a restaurant operator with 350 locations, plans to adopt a tracking system this year to handle the flow of applications for hourly jobs.

Julie Juvera, head of human resources at the chain’s headquarters in Louisville, Ky., says she gets as many as 400 résumés for a job opening within 24 hours after listing it online. “We used to hand-write a postcard to every single applicant saying ‘thank you so much for applying.’ But that’s become too overwhelming and tedious.”

Now the company sends an automated email to an applicant to tell him his résumé is being reviewed, and that it will contact him if it considers him for a job.

Anthoy Freda

Résumé overload isn’t just a big-company problem. Job seekers often are surprised when they don’t hear back from small businesses. These businesses rarely hire enough people to make an applicant-tracking system cost-effective, but even a one-time posting on a well-trafficked job board like Monster.com can garner hundreds of responses.

Only 19% of hiring managers at small companies look at a majority of the résumés they receive, and 47% say they review just a few, according to a recent survey by Information Strategies Inc., publisher of Your HR Digest, an online newsletter.

When Mr. Denton, the software programmer, sent his résumé to Google, Inc. and Walt Disney Co., he wasn’t terribly surprised when he received nothing but an email acknowledgment, but he expected a more personal response from a small Reno company.

When he called to ask for an update on his application, he was told the company’s vice president was in charge of hiring, and surmised that the executive was too busy to read through the submissions. “What I’m going to do is turn up on their doorstep,” says Mr. Denton. “I really have nothing to lose.”

— Rachel Emma Silverman contributed to this article.

By ELIZABETH GARONE

While the financial sector is slowly starting to recover, there are still thousands of professionals scrambling for a small number of available positions. More than ever, candidates need to stand out from the competition.

In this installment of The Résumé Doctor, three experts critique the résumé of a candidate early in his finance career. What he lacks in finance experience, he makes up for with an interesting background: two seasons as a tight end in the National Football League. Our experts say he needs to capitalize on his unusual background in a competitive market where skills—and standing out—are critical.

The Job Seeker:
Sean Mulcahy, 28, was laid off in December from a financial adviser position in Merrill Lynch’s New Haven, Conn., office. He says the “writing was on the wall” when an earlier round of layoffs hit in October. Mr. Mulcahy interviewed for a number of positions between October and his Dec. 13 layoff. Since December, he estimates he has sent out 150 résumés and has had several interviews. Previous to Merrill Lynch, he played in the NFL for the Cincinnati Bengals and the Carolina Panthers and he was a financial analyst at Castlekeep Investment Advisors in Westport, Conn.

The Objective: Mr. Mulcahy would like to make the jump from retail to institutional sales and remain in the New York metro area. At Merrill Lynch, he made $55,000 his first year, including commissions. He hopes to earn at least that in his next position.

The Experts: Offering feedback on Mr. Mulcahy’s résumé are Scott Fletcher, a partner at Goldsmith & Co., a New York executive-search firm focused on the financial-services and asset-management industries; Diane Morgan, director of career services at London Business School; and Sue Richey, the recruitment manager for the Associate Financial Consultant Program at RBC Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

The Résumé: Mr. Mulcahy’s fairly traditional résumé is a page, single-spaced. It leads with his contact information followed by his professional experience. He then lists his education followed by a “Systems and Applications” section. He finishes the résumé with a list of personal interests.

The Positives: Our experts like that Mr. Mulcahy has held two wealth-management positions. “It’s attractive to see that someone is focused and not moving around,” says Mr. Fletcher. All three were also impressed by his NFL experience. “That competitive nature is something sales and trading desks would value,” says Mr. Fletcher. Ms. Richey says it is quite common for the finance industry—and her firm in particular— to hire former athletes because they “understand the competitive nature of our business and this lends to their proven success.”

The Advice: While Mr. Mulcahy has covered most of his career bases in his résumé, he has done so at the expense of a visually appealing and easy-to-read document, according to two of our experts. Under his professional experience, he lists six different positions—including his time on the University of Connecticut football team and part-time stints as a sports reporter after college—in single-spaced lines, making it difficult to differentiate between them. Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Richey found Mr. Mulcahy’s résumé a chore to read and recommended he make it simpler.”His résumé forces the reader to figure out what he did when, and it appears cumbersome to read and interpret,” says Ms. Richey.

Mr. Mulcahy doesn’t include a summary statement. For Ms. Richey and Ms. Morgan, Mr. Mulcahy’s plan to move from retail to institutional sales warrants a one- to two-sentence summary statement at the top of the résumé explaining the shift. “It will be critical to connect any institutional experience he has—any client interaction, research, sales— with his objective,” says Ms. Richey.

For his professional experience, Mr. Mulcahy uses a stylistic diamond bullet pattern in lieu of traditional round bullet points to list his responsibilities, and none of the experts liked it. Nor did Ms. Richey like the style inconsistencies and grammar errors she says she found throughout the résumé: capital letters where they shouldn’t be, missing punctuation, uneven word spacing. From a visual standpoint and to get a “second look” from hiring managers, a résumé should be “perfect,” she says.

While all three experts were impressed with Mr. Mulcahy’s finance experience, they felt he needed to do a better job of illuminating it and showing how he could contribute to an institutional sales position. “He needs to demonstrate that he is a quick learner, that he can be a team player, that he is mentally tough enough to get through the break-in period to learn the ropes,” Mr. Fletcher says.

One way to do this would be to “show more context around his achievements,” suggests Ms. Richey. Rather than simply list “$400 million under management” for a bullet point under Merrill Lynch, he needs to describe how he contributed to that figure, she says. “The important thing to take away is that he produced at the level he should have been.”

All three experts say Mr. Mulcahy’s NFL experience could be his ticket to an interview as it sets him apart from other candidates. “I would go into more detail and really highlight excellence, stamina, perseverance as well as communication skills, leadership and adaptability,” says Ms. Morgan. “This needs to be much more thought out, and he needs to make the bridge for the reader on how his very able sports skills have well prepared him.”

The Systems and Applications section was confusing to the experts since Mr. Mulcahy includes his Series 7 and 66 licenses needed for selling securities and an insurance license alongside computer applications he knows. Our experts felt these warranted their own “Professional Licensing” section. Two suggested Mr. Mulcahy include mention of his efforts to become a certified financial planner in the licensing section. Currently, he includes it under his most recent position at Merrill Lynch.

As for the last section listing his personal interests, Mr. Fletcher felt it didn’t have a place on a finance résumé while Ms. Morgan and Ms. Richey felt it needed to be pared down. Mr. Mulcahy’s myriad experiences and interests (finance, sports, sports reporting, multiple hobbies) make for a well-rounded candidate—but also left Ms. Richey with a couple of concerns. “What is he really focused on?” she asks. “Is work going to get in the way of some of his interests?”

Write to Elizabeth Garone at cjeditor@dowjones.com