You give your resume one final review, click “Upload,” and send your application to the company of your dreams. Success! Time passes, you follow-up to ensure all materials have been received and still it’s all-silent on the interview front. With each day, you feel less confident about your application. Why isn’t the recruiter biting? There is a chance, unbeknownst to you, that your resume has been sent through a highly sophisticated scanner and turned up, well, with zero hits. That is, a machine has informed the recruiter your experiences do not align with the specific responsibilities stipulated in the job description.
“But I do have applicable work experience,” you may reply. The fact is, recruiters who spend countless hours thumbing through viable applicants are now turning to technology to facilitate the decision-making process. It eases some stress for big company recruiters who receive hundreds of applications each week by delegating much of the preliminary dirty work in screening applicants to a computer. This means if a computer cannot initially pick up on your key qualifications, neither will the employer. To offset your chances of falling into the “black abyss” of unviewed resumes, follow these few words of advice in order to increase the chances a human recruiter examines your entire application.
Keyword search machines, or applicant tracking systems (ATSs), highlight certain words and phrases that parallel the text typically located in a job description. These systems are becoming increasingly complex and sensitive to the resume’s entirety, rather than just the few winning words that will score you the next round. Therefore, it’s important to pull distinct words found in the job description and apply them appropriately to your own experiences (aka keyword optimization) without haphazardly copying and pasting them out of context or without any relevance.
You cannot play “Resume Scrabble,” so to speak, and hope to overload the computer with a plethora of scattered, high-scoring words. Commonly used ATSs are advanced enough to look at more than a handful of isolated words and will analyze how that word or phrase fits into the whole document. Instead, you must contextualize. For instance, attaching the word “organizational skills” won’t cut it unless you provide a specific context in which you developed and applied those skills.
It is critical when parsing out keywords that they are targeted and meaningful. You cannot hope to squeeze in every word from the job description. And most importantly, just because a machine may likely review your resume doesn’t mean a handful of friends and colleagues cannot review it either. Those who know your professional background can attest to whether you have implemented keywords consistent with your experiences. The human component of the application process will always be integral, so ultimately you must be able to convince the employer, not the computer, you are right for the job.
