Column | chapter nine algorithm

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Applicant Tracking Systems are a nightmare for many job seekers. Many people have nearly “perfect” resumes but somehow get rejected by the company’s resume system.

Today, we’re going to talk about job tracker systems and tips for improving your resume acceptance rate.

Business managers use job-tracking systems to manage job openings and screen resumes. The system rejects 75% of resumes, and only about 25% get an interview.

As many job seekers know, the problem is a bug in the job-tracking system itself. Resumes that aren’t formatted correctly, or don’t include the right keywords and phrases, can be misread by job tracking systems and judged to be mismatches for job openings, discounting the candidate’s candidacy.

Bersin&Associates is a consulting services firm based in Oakland, California that conducts talent management research for corporations. They found and confirmed a flaw in the job-tracking system.

They put it to the test: they created a “perfect” resume — a perfect fit for a clinical scientist position — and submitted it to Taleo’s job-tracking system, which is the leader of such a system. Their study found that some work experience was missing from a candidate’s CV because it was dated before the selection date entered by the employer. The system also failed to read the degree listed on a candidate’s resume, which could trick recruiters into thinking the candidate didn’t have the necessary degree for the job.

The net result: The system misread the resume and decided that it was only 43% relevant.

Josh Bersin, CEO of Bersin&Associates, points out that because all job-tracking systems use the same parsing software to read resumes, the vulnerabilities found in the test are common to most companies, not just Taleo.

This raises the question: if there is such a loophole in the system as to weed out good candidates, why do companies use it anyway?

The simple answer is that the system saves employers a lot of work. After preliminary evaluation, the system selects ten candidates with the highest matching degree to the job requirements. While some good candidates get passed over, there are still good candidates for HR to pick from.

If the company is using one of these systems to screen resumes, job seekers can learn how the system works to get them through. Preptel’S CEO, Jon Ciampi, knows this type of system from his previous job as general manager of SumTotal Systems, which makes job-tracking Systems. Preptel’s goal is to help job seekers navigate such systems. He shares the “secret” behind such systems — how they work and how job seekers can better design their resumes to get past them.

How does the system rank resume match?

Many job seekers and even career experts say applicant tracking systems rely on keywords to determine how well a candidate’s resume matches a job opening. So job seekers try to include keywords that HR or the system will be interested in.

In fact, the job seeker tracking system is most concerned with the uniqueness or correspondence of keywords. That is, keywords must be specific to the job AD (job). The system identifies keywords that are unique to each job, and then determines the ranking based on how well a candidate’s resume matches each keyword and the number of keywords in the candidate’s resume.

What does HR care about when viewing a resume in the system?

When HR looks at a list of candidates, they see the data filtered and collated by the system, which reads and collates the candidate’s information into a database.

The candidate tracking system contains different database fields to retrieve resume information, such as the candidate’s name, contact information, work history, title, education, name of previous employer, and length of employment. The system identifies and collates this information from the resume. However, if the resume is not formatted according to the requirements of the system, the system will not be able to recognize the relevant information. Once this happens, information on a candidate’s resume will be lost (such as a skills profile or administrative experience).

Pay attention to the following items to increase the acceptance rate of your resume:

  • 1. Read the job requirements as carefully as you can and customize your resume for each/type of job. Specifically, read through the technical and skill keywords that appear in the job requirements and include those keywords in your resume.

  • 2. Use the “Work Experience” label: Many job seekers think it will help them stand out by calling their Work Experience “professional Experience” or “professional accomplishments” or using more creative labels. In fact, it reduces the chances of passage. If you do not have such a “work experience” label, your relevant experience will be skipped by the computer because the system only recognizes the “work experience” label.

  • 3. Don’t start your work experience with a date: The system looks up the company name first, so to make sure it correctly reads and imports your work history, always use the name of your previous employer, your title, and the date you held the job.

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