What is an ATS?

An ATS is an Applicant Tracking System. It’s like a CRM (ie: Salesforce) for candidates.

They’re necessary.

They’re the one thing that will keep the hiring team (that you want to hire you) organized.

Believe me, you want the company to have and use an ATS, as it’s the one source of candidate-truth. It helps guide the interview process, enables streamlined communication, and helps the hiring team communicate and come to faster decisions.

Applicant Tracking Systems do not replace human recruiters. The burden, gift, job (however you look at it) of looking at every application falls on the recruiter.

I recently worked on four roles internally for a company. There were a total of 800+ resumes to go through just for those four roles days after they were posted.

Every time I would get through all of the resumes, there would be 100 new applicants later that day…it was never-ending.

I manually went through every single application.

When an organization has an ATS, all of the applications (no matter where they come from: LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Otta, etc) go to one place…that is the point of an ATS.

When a company doesn’t have an ATS it’s a nightmare because they’re manually having to go through each and every single application separately on LinkedIn or Indeed, and it’s a very time-consuming process.

⬆ BIG reason why when you’re mass-applying through the Easy-Apply button on LinkedIn, you’re not hearing back at all.

The ATS is your friend.

Here are some things that you can do to ensure that your résumé stands out and that you move onto the next round of the interview process:

• Make sure your skills align.

• Read the entire job description before you apply.

• Stop applying mindlessly.

• Ensure that your LinkedIn profile and your résumé match: the years, dates, names, and titles of companies and roles – it’s a red flag to the recruiter because just like there are fake jobs, there are fake candidates out there looking for information from competitors. Recruiters are on high alert for these things. If your LinkedIn and your résumé don’t match, your application will most likely be rejected.

Here’s what ATS’s don’t do:

• “Knock your resume out”

• Rank your resume based on skills, location, or application # - in fact, for most ATS’s, if you’re the first person to apply, and the recruiter doesn’t look at the resume pile for four days, and they get 243 applications, you’ll be the 243rd that they’ll see.

• Digest every resume format ⬇

Often resumes look jumbled when someone views them in the ATS because of the format they’re created in. By the time they’re uploaded and viewed, they don’t look quite the way you hoped.

But they will land in the system.

Remember To Always…

• Upload a PDF, not a word doc.

• Leave the photo of yourself off your resume.

• Use a resume template to be safe.

Otta.com is a great free resource to build and check your ATS-friendly format with. There are others (like The Ladders), but they tend to spam you with emails after you use their platform.

I say it every week and I’ll say it again - Unless you want your contact info resold, STOP applying to jobs on job board sites.

Apply directly on the company website.

Avoid fake jobs.

That’s all for this week.
Happy Hunting!

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