(FORTUNE Magazine) – Faced with a stagnant job scene, unemployed managers, career changers, and freshly minted college graduates are finding new ways to hunt for work. Big - corporations still look good to many, who flood human resources departments with resumes. IBM gets about one million a year. (See chart for other examples.) But few experts expect any mass hiring by big outfits even though the economy seems to be recovering, and small companies are not picking up the slack as they used to -- indeed, in the first three months of 1992 they let go more people than they hired. Clearly, job hunters need an edge. Here are techniques that some -- like the newly graduated MBAs shown above -- are using to beat the odds.

You don't have to be fresh out of college to hook up with this lead to finding a job. Provided you have a degree, Skillsearch of Nashville will offer a computerized version of your resume to corporate clients like Abbott Laboratories, Avon Products, and Southwestern Bell. A score of colleges, including Duke, Kansas, and North Carolina, offer the service to their alums for $49. But any college grad can be part of the system for the same price. Employers don't get the detail and precision offered by search firms, but they can save a lot of money. Skillsearch charges $375 per 12 resumes, culled from its computer database, that match some criterion set by the purchaser. The price was important to card retailer and manufacturer Smokey's Sports Cards (1991 sales: $21 million) of Las Vegas. CEO David Scheinman used Skillsearch to find managers willing to relocate to Nevada. Says he: ''It would have cost me ten times more to use employment agencies and classified ads.'' The result? Three new hires, all graduates registered with Skillsearch who quit their jobs to take a step up. Kathleen Korzan, 32, of North Haven, Connecticut, is director of marketing; Gary Hernandez, 28, of Bloomfield, New Jersey, manager of retail operations; and Lee Morrison, 29, of Oklahoma City, warehousing director. University Pro-Net in Palo Alto, California, runs a similar job bank. Clients include Apple Computer, Citicorp, Microsoft, and Polaroid. Standard fee: $10,000 for ten searches. Pro-Net handles only alumni of Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, who pay $25 for lifetime membership. -- R.T.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE CHART/SOURCE: HANIGAN CONSULTING CAPTION: A BLITZ OF RESUMES