Resume Crafting: Beat the bots
It’s already hard enough competing with the hundreds of other applicants fighting for the same job during this pandemic. Yet even if we have the skills, the years of experience, and the coincidental perfect parallel of previous achievements — we still might not have our resume viewed by the recruiter or hiring manager.
And that’s ridiculous. Technology has helped us apply to more jobs than ever and open those doors of possibilities into our lives. But at the same time, it’s completely gutted the human aspect of recruiting and forces us to spend hundreds of hours working on applications that will never see the light of day.
I’m talking of course, about those wretched ATS bots. Those scripts and programs used to parse our resumes and reduce us to a binary Yes/No based its “understanding” of the job description and our resume.
Some facts:
- 98% of large companies use an ATS to parse their applicants
- An average posting gets 250 applicants, only 4–6 get interviews
- 75% of resumes are never seen by human eyes
Depressed yet? Don’t worry, that part is just before the righteous anger that I’m at.
But scratch that, and use that as fuel to work. Because that’s simply the reality. It’s awful that this is the case, but the market is just THAT competitive. And we can’t change it, at least not now and by our own ability as of this moment.
What we have to do is adapt.
Quick fixes:
- ATS read .doc and .docx the best because thats what most people use. PDF keeps form, but bots don’t care about form. Use .DOC and .DOCX
- No images, graphs, charts, or information out of text. The ATS can’t read it, so its just wasted space. Worse. It’s valuable information not being conveyed
- Stick to bullet points. Scripts don’t care about linguistic ability, save that for the cover letter
- Avoid header and footers
But those aren’t enough. They’re quick and easy to do, so I’d recommend doing that ASAP for any jobs that you need to apply to that can’t wait for a larger resume overhaul.
Don’t take that to mean it’s enough though, to keep increasing your chances we have to keep trucking along:
- Use keywords, not buzzwords. That means looking through several postings and seeing which words pop out time and time again (or use a word cloud generator to make things easier)
- Place keywords strategically amongst your content. Don’t spam it, that’ll make humans toss your resume if eyes do finally see it — but the bots count frequency to ensure that the keywords apply
- Don’t be fancy. Keep a simple outline of your resume. The outlines and sections should be dead simple, both in naming and placement
- There are some free ATS scanners on the web that’ll tell you how well your resume is being parsed. Use them!
To ensure their efficiency, companies have effectively introduced an additional gatekeeper in the application process. One that we will never see, hear, or get to speak with but whom has the ultimate say of whether or not we ever get in touch with a human being (which is why referrals are so important!). Ultimately if we are applying via online portal, we need to recognize that our resume needs to be read by both machine and human so we cannot just create something that only bots can read or only humans can appreciate.
Hate them. Rue them. Rant, rave. Do what you will, but remember to do what you must.
Good luck. As always, if you liked what you read and are interested in seeing more, please share and leave a clap!
