Before the stresses of interviewing begins, job candidates must first endure something arguably more insidious … the application process.

Unfortunately. applying often turns out to be nothing more than busy work. And while enduring the frustration is sometimes necessary to eventually get promising employment leads, it still sucks to spend hours designing a résumé, crafting a cover letter and answering supplementary questions without getting closure.

In response, let's look at a few major reasons candidates are getting their applications tossed so you can avoid those potholes, get more interviews and start working on your career instead of more applications.

1. Requirements and experience are poorly aligned. The most obvious reason you're not getting responses is that there isn't enough intersection between what you've done and what they need. That doesn't mean these are jobs you're incapable of doing, but when hiring managers don't see 70 to 80 percent of your experience aligning with their requirements, you might appear to need too much ramp up before you can complete the necessary duties.

• How to avoid this pothole. While there are ways to explain how your experience would translate to success in a role you haven't specifically held before, you may want to diversify by applying for more roles in which you could objectively hit the ground running. Depending on how urgent your search is, deploy the same strategy as when applying to college and choose jobs you could be trained for and safety jobs you could slide into easily.
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2. Lazy spell checking. Even if the rest of the content is sound, hiring managers who see grammatical or formatting errors will likely wonder how you could be trusted to handle larger projects if you couldn't create a few clean documents. "Your application is a reflection on you, your attention to detail, and how strongly you feel about a job opening," says Jennifer Loftus, national director of human resources consulting firm Astron Solutions and former president of New York City's Society of Human Resources Management chapter. "Sending materials with typos is a sure way to say to a recruiter you do not care about the organization or the job."

• How to avoid this pothole. Proofread and spell check your application materials several times before sending. Read them out loud to catch errors you miss when reading. Ask a friend or relative to read them as well. A fresh set of eyes may discover something you missed.
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3. No specific tailoring. In a 2012 interview with Infusive Solutions, Peter Cappelli - a Wharton School of Business professor and the author of "Why Good People Can't Get Jobs” - explains how hiring requirements have shifted from hire for attitude and train for skill to in most cases considering only candidates who can contribute immediately. So if your application materials don't clearly show interest and ability in completing the necessary requirements quickly, you may appear too risky to consider.

Read more | money.usnews.com