As a candidate, you put in a lot of time to make sure your CV is flawless and presents your qualifications in the best light. Yet, despite your best efforts, you are not receiving enough interviews for positions for which you are qualified. This is perhaps due to the rise in the use of applicant tracking systems (ATS) used by many companies to sift through candidates’ applications.
“Applicant Tracking System” ATS is employed by many businesses to automate the hiring process. In the past, an ATS was nothing more than a repository for resumes. The capabilities of an ATS have grown significantly in recent years. Examples of what an ATS can accomplish include:
Skim and evaluate hundreds of application forms
Construct, oversee, and update a career site
Communicate with potential applicants via electronic mail and mobile phone
Keep resumes on file for future openings
To get noticed, many job seekers today are getting creative with their CV presentations. Some people may even spend money to have a CV designed to look like a work of art. Unfortunately, an applicant tracking system eliminates all of this before a human recruiter sees it. Even more crucially, if you’re using an older, less sophisticated applicant tracking system, elaborate formatting can cause mistakes in its interpretation.
Header and footer text is prone to be misread or mistyped.
It’s easy for text to get jumbled up in complex tables.
Words in a text box that are obscured by shading or color should be avoided.
ATS software is unable to decipher company logos or other graphical elements.
It is common practice for a recruiter or hiring manager to conduct a keyword search after the initial review of a resume that was submitted online. This facilitates the search for qualified individuals. It’s no longer enough to just paraphrase relevant parts of their job description to include these days. And here’s what you can do about it:
Explore many postings for comparable opportunities to identify areas of overlap in terms of desired qualifications and prior experience.
We recommend focusing on the keywords that represent the most often occurring requirements.
The connection between long-form words and their abbreviations or acronyms is lost on many popular ATSs. When a recruiter or even the ATS is looking for one version of the word, this can cause confusion. Within a resume, in the case presented above, SEO should appear both as the abbreviation and the long form: Search Engine Optimization.
Dates are typically searched for in applicant tracking systems using the MM/YYYY format, thus a date like 02/2021 would be searched for as February 2021. Always include both the month and year, as giving simply the year can lead to misunderstandings. When only the year is provided, certain ATSes will automatically place any job experience on the first of the year.
With the help of modern applications like Indeed’s one-click application, it is possible to apply for dozens of jobs in a short amount of time. However, an ATS will act as a roadblock and reject your application due to your failure to meet specified keywords/criteria if you are applying to positions that are beyond your qualifications in an effort to try your luck or acquire a job faster.
If you come across a dream job it calls for five years of experience but you only have two, you should still apply. Many businesses prefer to conduct interviews with a large number of candidates because they believe this increases the likelihood of finding someone with the right mix of experience and expertise.
The.docx and.pdf file formats are generally preferred by applicant tracking systems. Files saved in .txt, .rtf, or .pages formats may be automatically deleted by an applicant tracking system. Check the output file format of the online resume generator you’re considering using. Some CV makers will actually produce an image of your resume (.jpg or .png, for example). Also, as you’ll have learned from the first piece of advice, an ATS is unable to interpret visual content.
When in doubt, a.docx is the safest bet if they don’t say otherwise. You can use Google Docs to create a .docx file if you don’t have Microsoft Office.
Using an applicant tracking system frees up valuable time and resources for recruiters, which in turn benefits the candidate experience. In order to increase your chances of getting called for an interview, you need to make sure that an applicant tracking system (ATS) can decipher the information on your CV. If you follow the above advice, you’ll significantly improve your chances of making it past the initial screening round of the hiring process.
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