Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
As you know, applying for internships or jobs is time-consuming. I spent lot of time applying for internships during my school years and I now know some tricks to optimise my applications. One of them is to know exactly what is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and how it works.
Almost all recruitment agencies and most major corporations with an in-house recruitment function use some form of ATS to handle job postings, applicants, resumes, interviews.
Be wary of the ATS, its sole purpose is to screen candidates before they ever can be seen by recruiters. However, its flaw is the lack to read graphics.
Bullet points, certain fonts, italics, headers, footers and colors. All of them are read as graphics and either scramble the lines or worse, delete your resume. A better alternative is creative formatting.
Some of the famous ATS you probably used without knowing it while submitting a resume online if you work in the Internet industry:
Jobvite: Twitter, Criteo
Jobscore: Google, VMware
Greenhouse: airBnB, Pinterest, Evernote
Greenhouse offers to upload your resume as well as attaching it with dropbox or pasting it as plain text. You can also point your linkedIn profile out.
Screening is just the first step. Do not forget recruiters spend less than 20 seconds on a resume, so it’s vital to grab their attention quick. Relevant content is king! The top third of your resume is the most important. Don’t include roles from over ten years ago unless it’s essential, list achievements rather than duties. Employers want problem solvers. Don’t forget to own this resume with some first person narratives, this is a personal branding document.
Remember, there is a difference between the resumes that you apply online with and the resume to hand in person.
