SOUTH BEND — Some local residents are responding to the slow economy by looking for new, higher-paying jobs. While the goal is still the same, the job-hunting strategy has changed in the last several years.

Paper applications are pretty much out of style and computer screens are in. In fact they're so popular that they're used almost exclusively by companies when they hire people.

Ten years ago, the mail bins at Peoplelink in near downtown South Bend would have contained stacks of paper. The company’s mailroom would have been a warehouse for résumés and job applications.

But now the employment agency, like many other American companies, is going virtually paperless.

People looking for work are able to get their résumés on the market faster and more efficiently. A computer looks for key, target words on the résumé. For example, if a company is looking for a welder, the computer looks for the word “welder.” It separates those select résumés from the rest of the stack.

This technology is called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. It's been around for about 10 years, but now it's been refined. Peoplelink Executive Vice President Jay Mattern tells WSBT that the technology has come a long way.

"The problem is that, early on with OCR, it would go through and look at all the words in the document but it might think that (the word) ‘the’ is ‘and’ or ‘but’ is ‘or’ and you'd end up a lot of bad words or it couldn't read words so you'd get a bunch of squiggly marks and things like that that were unreadable," he said. “But the technology has been improved to the point where you can get pretty much almost 100 percent feedback on the words from that recognition software.”

Paper is not totally obsolete. Some people still use a pencil to apply for work. In either case, Peoplelink founder Jay Wilkinson urges applicants to accentuate the positive.

"I kind of liken it to buying a home,” he said. “They've got three bedrooms and three baths but they don't have that swimming pool. So we need to talk about the positive about those things or how to overcome the negatives."

Wilkinson has been in the employment business for more than 20 years. He says job applicants still need to follow up with potential employers. He says all the technology is fast and efficient but, he added, “It's all about face time.”