Welcome to the 21st Century!
How to win against ATS and find your dream job!
A note about today's job market - It is simply not true that Americans don't want to work. As a result of the pandemic, more unemployment benefits were paid out than at any time in history. Many hourly workers received compensation equal to or, or in some cases slightly more than they were earning on the job from which they were laid off.
After months of forced unemployment, record numbers enrolled in internet-based training courses and countless others worked part-time jobs "under the table." Given the choice of returning to work, or continuing with record-level benefits plus additional income from "under the table" jobs, the choice was not difficult. Thousands of jobs remain unfilled because it is simply not profitable to return.
This also gives a very false impression of the job market. The competition for high-paid jobs with highly desirable employers is intense. This brings us to ATS, driven by Artificial Intelligence:
To understand why you absolutely must deal with ATS, you need to understand how it came to be!
ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) are electronic gatekeepers, standing between you and the job interview. They read every word of your resume and compare it against the employer’s job description. As a consequence of the pandemic, job listings routinely attract hundreds of resumes, submitted via the internet. On average, over 90% of resumes are rejected and never read by a human! On average, the remainder are routinely reduced to just five candidate interviews!
So, why did ATS suddenly become the single most critical factor in hiring?
Before the internet, jobs were posted in newspaper classified ads. An employer might receive 7 applications, interview 5, and hire 1. Today, that same job posting appears on the internet and is super easy to find and apply.
Result: Employers are drowning in resumes! For the job applicant, there is no expense at all to find job listings and apply, and the unemployed are doing so in massive numbers!
Almost any job posting will receive 100 resumes or more, sometimes as many as 1000+. Worse yet, there is a growing mentality that says, “Why not apply to everything? Use a shotgun approach, don’t worry about qualifications, and see if I get an offer?”
Hiring is expensive for employers.
The average hiring cost for one employee is $4,129. (GlassDoor) Human Resource professionals spend a lot of time making sure an applicant is qualified for the job, before sending them for the all-important 2nd interview with the department manager.
If you're an employer looking for the very best candidate, and you're starting with a stack of 1000 resumes, you are facing about 4 weeks just for manual review. - Meanwhile, the position remains unfilled and the employer suffers.
Enter ATS powered by Artificial Intelligence.
ATS can reduce this initial review time to a few minutes. The best 10 resumes are selected for review, the remaining 990 are removed from consideration, and on average, only the best five are actually interviewed by a human. This is a staggering reduction in an employer's cost and time to fill a position with a qualified candidate!
Today, over 94% of employers are reporting the use of ATS for hiring purposes.
Virtually all recruiters are using LinkedIn, which itself, maintains a major ATS system with millions of resumes. Some ATS systems will review a 1000 resumes, select the best 10, and actually set the interview with 5 of those 10, before handing results over to the hiring manager!
In other words, it’s completely possible to have an interview set up with a live hiring manager who has yet to even read your resume!
Your resume faces fierce competition!
The oldest known resume was written in the year 1482, and the concept has remained virtually the same until the 1980’s when resumes taped on VHS became popular. The internet changed everything. If your resume is not ATS optimized, you are using 1482 technology!
Judgment Day and Rise of the Machines.
ATS emerged about the time Arnold was filming the Terminator series, sometime between Judgment Day and Rise of the Machines. How appropriate!
Resume writers using the 1482 technology, were pretty much limited to either hoping the resume fit the ATS matrix or later, trying to insert some keywords into the resume, which made for some pretty awkward reading. Then technology caught up, on behalf of the resume writer.
A High Tech Solution for the Resume
By building a core competencies index designed to sync with the employer’s job requirements, a resume that would otherwise score 17 by ATS, can now score within the highly coveted sweet spot of 60-80 and make it into the interview stack!
You have now transformed your resume from a fishing expedition into a targeting machine!
Here’s an example of what can happen when you have a modern resume with a properly installed Core Competencies Index and you apply the correct strategy: (This is typical of feedback I receive on a regular basis):
“Glenn I wanted to let you know I had roughly 30 interviews and turned down a dozen positions. I accepted an offer as an account executive at (withheld) Thank you for all of your help!”
Great jobs are out there and available but the resume competition is fierce. Don't be shut out of the dream job you deserve just because of your resume presentation!
Implementing a smart strategy for dealing with ATS is critical. Every resume I write comes with a built-in core competencies index and instructions on how to leverage your Index into a powerful opportunity magnet! This knowledge is of incredible value and absolutely works!
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