As we have written before, your CV has to be polished enough to make a good impression on recruiters. However, have you ever heard that the first agent inspecting your candidature is far from being human? Let us introduce you to the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) allowing HR-departments to optimize their processes including pre-selecting procedures.
What actually happens with your CV once it is submitted via a jobboard or a company employment portal? It actually gets processed by a robot first! This system literally scans your resume for specific keywords set by recruiters such as particular skills, companies’ names, languages, titles of universities you might have graduated from and much more. In case your CV contains a sufficient percent of these “matching” words, it proceeds directly to recruiters, if not – it just remains stored in a database. The second outcome is surely less desirable for the majority of job seekers!
The only solution is to customize your resume. This piece of advice is sometimes neglected by candidates. Especially after being rejected many times, they assume it is a waste of time to rewrite a CV each time for a new employer. Therefore, they put themselves in a closed circle of “ATS blocked applications”. This circle can be, however, easily broken by thoroughly tailoring your experience and skills to different jobs you fancy.
Here are some tips that will help you to customise your resume appropriately:
Guess possible “magical” keywords using a job description. The first place to look for keywords is a vacancy outlay. Get a piece of paper or open a digital document and list all the words linked to certain competences requested (skills directly linked to the main job function, specific software skills and languages), education backgrounds preferred and location markers (city, country). Mak suree you include many of these items in your CV.
Make use of digital tools available. Word clouds are useful not only for impressive presentations, but also to get some insights about keywords in a piece of text. You might like Wordle, Worditout, Tagcrowd or another tool. Find the one that suits you most and use it every time you get confused with keywords. Also, check the tool called Autocoder that works similar to ATS matching job descriptions and specialties based on keywords. You can just put the whole vacancy description in there and see the result. To make it more precise, add ‘’Supplementary Inputs’’: an employer’s name, education level required, industry and job categories.
Get rid of all the “fluff”. By that we mean any irrelevant information.
1) Ask yourself this question when in doubt: “Is this info related to the position I am going to apply for? ”;
2) Delete all the graphics and images in your CV except the picture of yourself. Why? Just because ATS cannot read and comprehend them!
3) Use a web-friendly fond (like Arial or Georgia). Go safe;
4) No complicated templates, no shading, no special characters. Don’t confuse robots. Simple is the new black, when it comes to your CV.
5) Compare your CV and a job description. Verify all the possible keywords before you feel confident enough to send it.
Remember, your CV is in your precious hands and it’s up to to make it tailored for each job you fancy. We hope these tips will be helpful for you. Have you any questions about this article, do not hesitate to contact us.
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Keywords: ATS, TMS, application, CV, resume, employment, unemployment, apply, vacancies, jobs, engineering, engineer, research, programmer, software, programming, technology, recruitment
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