Part of the challenge of doing all of this career searching and mapping is that the darned resume is still there. And the core myth in the job search process in the marketplace and at most companies is that the resume is the key.
As we shared above, companies on average get hundreds of resumes for a position, and many “have to post” by company policy. We hear over and over of companies that don’t even look at the digital resumes, or they use various tools to look through the resumes for them, at least for the first pass to get to a small number to review. They use resume sorting systems in our modern AI-assisted era.
How do these systems work? How can you have better odds with this game?
Welcome to the world of ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems).
Whether you are applying for a job on a company website or on Indeed.com (or others), you or the HR executive may stick your resume into an ATS, and there are ways that you can thrive better, especially after you’ve already looked at your transferable hard and soft skills.
Read further with the article “8 Things You Need to Know About Applicant Tracking Systems” at https://www.jobscan.co/blog/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-applicant-tracking-systems.
YouTube video from the article:
Most experts now suggest that you customize your resume for each job. If many companies use ATS’s, it makes sense that you may need to adjust the keywords to match the job just to show up!
We recommend that people start a Master Resume, which has everything that they have done that expresses and evidences their transferable skills. Then, when you apply for a job, you can pull things out of the master resume to specifically match the items in the job description. You can keep building the Master Resume as your skills expand, keeping a single document updated.
A Tool to Help: Jobscan.co
Would you like to update your resume with the new Transferable Skills that you worked on before? You will have started to rewrite it above. Would you like an AI assistant?
Let’s try Jobscan.co to start.
You can create a free trial account for 5 uses of the JobScan.co tool, plus 2 free scans a month and 5 keyword comparisons a month (see pricing).
Take your resume and one of the job descriptions from the prior exercise, and put them both into the tool.
What comes out? What are the elements that match? What are the word choices that didn’t match?
Of note: the scan may say more about the job description itself than about your resume. It may highlight that the job description mentions the same word 5 times across the document. It might be vague. It might have a grab bag of skills that you would not equate to be in the same document.
Jobscan.co has added a Job Tracker feature. For times that you are seeking a job, it might be worth the $30/month for 3 months fee to use the tool.
Other Tools
The market for scanning tools has expanded in recent years. Jobscan was one of the early ones to auto-match to ATS readings of job descriptions. Others have joined the market. I have not tried ResumeGo.net nor have figured out how they make money from it: https://www.resumego.net/resume-checker. I assume that they are collecting and selling the data. ResyMatch.io is another tool that seems to do similar things: https://cultivatedculture.com/resume-scanner.
LinkedIn Profile Writing
LinkedIn can be an avenue for professionals to kick your tires and for you to be discovered by recruiters for a specific job. As with an ATS, recruiters and HR professionals usually use search terms that are very specific to the industry, role, and job. LinkedIn makes most of its money from both boosting job posting, and recruiters that pay a monthly fee to search within the tool.
LinkedIn, Jobscan, and many other organizations have LinkedIn profile writing guides. Some of these pages can be linkbait to just get you to their websites to sell ads or affiliate links to other services. Others are from professionals who know from experience what works and what doesn’t.
- LinkedIn basic how-to document on Profiles: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a554351/how-do-i-create-a-good-linkedin-profile-?lang=en
- More recent LinkedIn Pulse Blog Post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/elevate-your-profile-guide-writing-better-linkedin-content-quinn-che-1ssmc on WHDE Framework (Write, Hook, Deliver, Engage)
- You can find Jobscan’s at https://www.jobscan.co/linkedin-profile-writing-guide. They also have a profile optimization tool that analyzes what you have written versus the job descriptions you are aiming for, including skills and keywords for optimal searchability.
There are many resources now that pitch to use AI in ATS and Customizing. See the Bullet Point resource page and a long list of new AI tools for job search support.