What I learned from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
By: Oyidiya Oji
Tags: Job Hunting, Artificial Intelligence, Applicant Tracking System, Recruiting, Human Resources

What I learned from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

I have been applying to jobs in many different ways and one was by entering to the company’s website and going to their careers’ section. Seems like all of them work the same: you enter your data, your resumé and your motivation letter. Easy as it is, I hardly ever got an answer from any of these applications, but how many applications they receive for each offer?

Companies on Linkedin receive for a data scientist/analyst job an average of 300 applications. If the company has several open positions the number of CVs can rise easily. That’s a lot of eyes reading at speed of light (they spend skimming them 7.4 seconds only) when they could spend their time doing other tasks.

And that’s when ATS appear! ATS or Applicant Tracking Systems are algorithms that make easy filtering to resumés that are most appealing to recruiters. They can choose the experience of the candidates, their expertise in different tools, location, etc. With ATS the job is easier for them, but harder for job seekers like me.

It standardizes the hiring process, at least the first step which is applying to the job. Fortunately, there are ways to beat it. The key is keeping your curriculum vitae as simple and clear as you can. That means that formatting is everything. I used to have a lovely 2 columns CV that I thought was easy to read, but I never thought of machines reading it. ATS dislike information distributed in columns, charts, sophisticated writing styles and symbols. The program basically doesn’t understand any of these things. Do you still doubt if your CV is readable when submitting it into a platform? Try this interesting tool created by Jafer Haider. It shows you how recruiters see your work history when uploaded into one of them.

Once you see how bad your CV is read you start wondering how you can improve it. Traditional curriculums are the ones who have a higher score of readability. That means using Arial or Times New Roman and using key words according to the job you are interested in. Those documents with an 80% of accuracy or higher are more likely to be more attractive. Key words are spread all over the offer and sometimes are difficult to spot. A tool that can help with this is Job Scan. You only need to upload the job offer and your resumé. It ranks your accuracy and tells you the specific words you should include in order to have a better score. Free version allows you to scan 5 offers per month so be careful!

Another thing I saw using Jafer Haider’s tool was my work history could show soft skills that Lever and other ATS are able to detect even if you didn’t mentioned those on it. This being said, I think it’s good to know what our natural speech says about us. Again there’s a tool that can help you learn how you are according to how you express yourself.

Crystal is used by headhunters who want to hire a specific person and don’t know how he/she/them is apart from their Linkedin profile. It also adds information about how people should and should not approach in order to get a yes from that individual. We can use this software the other way around and learn what our profile says from us. This interesting tool is a Chrome extension and allows to scan 10 profiles for free. It’s a task that will help you understand how people see you, something that might change with time and of course can be trained.

As you might already know, looking for a job is already a job and I think this example is one of the evidences. It took time to understand the dynamic of the ATS, but now I feel more comfortable with the steps I take through my goal of finding a job. It’s a long journey that should be done little by little, understanding how AI is helping recruiters daily in order to find the best candidates. This tips will only help you on the first step which is knocking at the company’s door after you will have to show how suitable you are for the position.

I hope this recommendations can help you build more confidence in your search and more luck towards what you do. Are there more tools I should take into account? I would be glad to read your comments below and try your suggestions.