This is a story with one happy ending, and a disappointing conclusion for more than 200 others.

It is the story of Cheryl Lickfeld, the chief financial and administrative officer at Travers Collins&Co., and her quest to fill a single job opening for an administrative assistant at the Buffalo marketing and communications firm.

It is the story of just how intense the competition has become for jobs in the longest and deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Our story begins a few weeks ago, when Lickfeld posted an ad for the position on Travers Collins’ Web site and in the Buffalo News’ BuffaloJobFinder.com Web site.

While Lickfeld says she expected a robust response, given the recession and a local unemployment rate topping 8 per-cent, she didn’t anticipate receiving more than 200 resumes.

“I was actually very surprised at the number of responses,” she says.

What surprised her even more, however, was how many of those resumes and cover letters had typos and other mistakes. One applicant, who otherwise would have snagged one of the 10 interviews Travers Collins granted for the job, missed out because of a resume that said “administrative cuties include . . .”

Some even misspelled Lickfeld’s name. It’s not Lickfield, or Lickens, or even “To Whom it May Concern,” she says. It’s Lickfeld, just as it was spelled in the job posting. Mistakes like that just made her job of winnowing down the pool of applicants so much simpler.

“If you had one typo—and I found them all—it went straight into the ‘No’ pile,” she says. “We need someone who’s detail-oriented and the best and the smartest person.”

Others didn’t follow the directions that Lickfeld had explicitly detailed in the job posting, asking applicants to submit both a resume and a cover letter by e-mail. Many applicants skipped the cover letter, earning them a one-way ticket to the “No” pile.

Lickfeld also was struck by the informality of some of the applicants, which she thinks might be related to the comfortable nature of e-mail, compared with more traditional letters. Cover letters that started off with ‘Dear Cheryl,’ or ‘Hi Cheryl,’ didn’t score any points with Lickfeld.

Neither did the applicant whose cover letter addressed salary requirements, followed by this sentence: “However, it would not be a problem for me if the salary amount was increased (smile).”

Lickfeld didn’t smile, and in the end, more than half of the applicants were eliminated simply because their resumes or cover letters had typos or they didn’t follow directions.

“It’s one of those things that, in a different market, you might have let slide,” Lickfeld says. “But in a difficult job market, with more than 200 resumes, it was a good way to weed it down.”

And it is a difficult job market. The Buffalo Niagara region has lost nearly 17,000 jobs over the last year, leaving the area with fewer jobs than it’s had in 16 years, according to October employment data from the state Labor Department. Our unemployment rate is at its highest point since the mid-1980s.

Nationally, there now are 6.3 workers competing for every job opening, the U. S. Labor Department reported last week. Before the recession began, there were only 1.7 jobless workers for every job opening. That means the competition for every job is almost four times more intense than it was two years ago.

In such an intensely competitive job market, the last thing you want to do is give a potential employer an excuse to put you in the “No” pile.