The Resume vs. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
There are an awful lot of misconceptions when it comes to the technology employers use to keep track of candidates’ resumes. Many businesses have adopted applicant tracking systems (ATS) to organize, expedite, and legitimize their selection process. Collecting candidate resumes and applications through an ATS makes it easy and fast to categorize, communicate with, and track the status of each candidate.
Contrary to popular belief, an ATS is not the job seeker’s worst enemy. Here are some things you should know about ATS, based on my personal experience using them as a recruiter:
The black void doesn’t exist.
Your resume doesn’t disappear into a black void when you send it through the company website. I have never worked with an ATS where I could not personally access and view every single one of the resumes submitted to one of my jobs.
There is no automatic gatekeeper.
An ATS can’t disqualify candidates based on their initial application. The closest thing I had to an automatic gatekeeper was the ability to add screening questions specific to the job requirements. For example, I could ask candidates to answer the question “how many years of experience do you have with XYZ?” and set the requirement to a minimum of 2 years. If the candidate entered anything less than 2, they were automatically disqualified (but I still had access to their resume).
Word documents are slightly better than PDFs.
ATS parse incoming documents and interpret and categorize information into groupings such as contact information, skills, education, and employment. Most ATS interpret Word documents more accurately than PDFs.
Most resume designs are ATS-friendly.
Your application will not be rejected because your resume design is too fancy. The risk is that the ATS will parse or interpret the information inaccurately, but that doesn’t mean the recruiter won’t be able to see your resume. When viewing an applicant’s resume, some ATS will show a “quick view” of the formatted document, and some will show the parsed information in a standardized, unformatted view. To see what your resume looks like after being parsed, save your document as a .txt file, with no formatting.
The ATS won’t reject you for using the wrong keywords.
While it’s critical to incorporate keywords from the job description into your resume, an ATS won’t reject your application because you used the wrong keywords or not enough of the right keywords. Resume keywords are important when an employer searches within their ATS database for candidates. For example, at any point in time, I could search “accountant” in the ATS, and it would show me all the resumes from anyone who had ever applied to work with the company and included the term “accountant” in their resume.
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