Beat the system!! How optimizing Resume for Applicant Tracking System

Landing an interview for a position in a giant organization can feel impossible if you don’t have any personal connections. People often blame the sheer volume of resumes that are submitted—HR simply can’t review them all with enough detail to see what a perfect candidate you are! And this is partially true—one study suggests that recruiters spend only six seconds looking at each resume. However, many resumes are trashed before they’re even seen by human eyes. How it’s possible? Many large organizations rely on applicant tracking systems (ATS) to help pre-filter resumes.

So what’s is applicant tracking system (ATS)?

An applicant tracking system (ATS), also called a candidate management system, is a software application designed to help an enterprise recruit employees more efficiently. The systems work by scanning resumes for contextual keywords and key phrases, mathematically scoring them for relevance, and sending only the most qualified ones through for human review. Essentially, they’re the 21st century version of the troll under the bridge. An ATS can be used to post job openings on a corporate Web site or job board, screen resumes, and generate interview requests to potential candidates by e-mail. Other features may include individual applicant tracking, requisition tracking, automated resume ranking, customized input forms, pre-screening questions and response tracking, and multilingual capabilities. It is estimated that roughly 50 percent of all mid-sized companies and almost all large corporations use some type of applicant tracking system.

How Applicant Tracking Systems rank a Resume's relevance?

Many job seekers and career experts think applicant tracking systems rely on keywords to determine the fit between a candidate's resume and a specific job. They do their best to identify keywords in a job description that may be important to an employer or applicant tracking system, then they stuff these keywords in their resumes.
In fact, what matters most to applicant tracking systems is the uniqueness or "rarity" of the keyword or the keyword phrase. That is, the keywords and phrases must be specific to a particular job ad. Applicant tracking systems, which "see" all job ads a company has ever published, determine which keywords and phrases in a specific job ad are unique to that job ad.
The systems then develop a ranking based on how closely a job seeker's resume matches each keyword and phrase and how many of the keyword phrases the job seeker's resume has, he adds.

What recruiters see when they look at your Resume in an Applicant Tracking System?

When a recruiter clicks on the name of a candidate whom the applicant tracking system has ranked as a good match for a job, the recruiter doesn't see the resume the candidate submitted. The recruiter sees the information the applicant tracking system pulled from the candidate's resume into a database, as the picture below shows.

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Error-prone applicant tracking systems kill 75 percent of job seekers' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes, despite how qualified they may be. Job seekers' only hope for rising through these systems is to understand exactly how these systems work and how best to optimize their resumes for them.

Applicant tracking systems contain different database fields for information on a resume, such as the candidate's name, contact details, work experience, job titles, education, employer names and periods of employment. These systems try to identify this information on a job seeker's resume, but if a resume isn't formatted according to the applicant tracking system, it won't pull this information into the proper fields. Some of it might be missed altogether, such as a skills profile or an executive summary.

Some Tips for Optimizing Your Resume for an Applicant Tracking System

Job seekers can increase their resumes' chances of getting through an applicant tracking system by heeding the following do's and don'ts:

1. Never send your resume as a PDF: Because applicant tracking systems lack a standard way to structure PDF documents, they're easily misread.
2. Don't include tables or graphics: Applicant tracking systems can't read graphics, and they misread tables. Instead of reading tables left to right, as a person would, applicant tracking systems read them up and down.
3. Feel free to submit a longer resume: The length of your resume doesn't matter to an applicant tracking system. It will scan your resume regardless of whether it's two pages or four. Submitting a longer (say three or four page) resume that allows you to pack in more relevant experience and keywords and phrases could increase your chances of ranking higher in the system.
4. Call your work experience, "Work Experience": Sometimes job seekers refer to their work experience on their resume as their "Professional Experience" or "Career Achievements" (or some other variation on that theme). "People get very creative on their resume because they think it will help them stand out, but in fact it hurts them”. "Often the computer will completely skip over your work experience because you didn't label it as such."
5. Don't start your work experience with dates: To ensure applicant tracking systems read and import your work experience properly, always start it with your employer's name, followed by your title, followed by the dates you held that title. (Each can run on its own line). Applicant tracking systems look for company names first. Never start your work experience with the dates you held certain positions.
6. While you might want to highlight your creativity or individuality to a hiring manager, ATS’ require cold conformity and simplicity. Therefore, you’ll need to delete any extra touches you’ve added to your resume, like logos, pictures, symbols, and shadings. Also stick to standard resume formatting in a normal font like Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman—the ATS can’t read fancy fonts and will reject your resume out of confusion.
7. Only include the usual sections of a resume: Qualifications, Professional Experience, Education, Skills, and the like. Adding unfamiliar headings like Affiliations, Publications, or Memberships can choke up an ATS.
8. Include verb phrases and skills written in the job description on your own resume. These are very likely to be the same keywords and phrases the hiring manager has programmed the ATS to pick up—“project manager,” “Final Cut pro,” or “social media marketing,” for example.
9. Try services like Wordle and TagCrowd to help you figure out which keywords to focus on. Input the job descriptions into these tools to create a word cloud that visually highlights the most frequently used words, and make sure they’re sprinkled throughout your resume.
10. Use both the acronym and the spelled-out form of any given title, certification, or organization, so you’re set regardless of which format the ATS is looking for. For example: Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
11. Career objective sections are kind of a waste of space. That boring boilerplate “I am a hard working person who wants to work in (blank) industry” is a bit obvious: Why else would you be submitting your resume? Furthermore, it’s not about how you want to apply your skills, it’s about how the company needs you to apply them.
12. Try replacing this with a qualifications summary—a six-sentence (or bullet pointed) section filled with ATS-friendly keywords. Even better, use those six sentences to concisely present the crème of the crop of your achievements, major skills, and important experiences.
13. Spelling mistakes are the death of your resume. While a human being can at least figure out what you mean (before tossing your resume into the trash in disapproval), an ATS will terminate you immediately because it will simply have no idea what you’re talking about.