We see a lot of job candidates on social media express their frustration about not getting call backs. They apply to dozens and dozens of jobs, but nobody from HR even bothers to reach out. Sometimes, companies don’t even tell you when you get declined. It can feel like you’re submitting job apps into a black hole.
Here’s the truth: you are wasting your time.
The “spray and pray” strategy is totally broken. Almost every company has a set of tools to screen out applicants before a human ever has a chance to look at your resume. Also called Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS’s), these tools can take a variety of different forms. The companies that sell these tools will gladly tell you all about them, like Oracle or Workable or Workday. At the most basic level, they help companies track candidates along every stage in their onboarding process, from posting job ads to get listed on platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed, to making an offer and onboarding a new employee.
ATS’s also weed out poor candidates by matching keywords in a candidate’s resume with keywords in the job ad. And here’s the key thing: these systems are usually pretty stupid. They look for exact keyword matches. Close doesn’t count in these situations — you want to mirror the specific keywords and phrases contained in the job ad. That’s the only way a recruiter will ever actually get presented with a chance to read your resume.
Here is our best advice for making it through the ATS gauntlet:
- Put the job ad into a word cloud or phrase counting tool. There are lots of free versions out there.
- Use that word cloud and common sense to identify the most important skills the company is looking for.
- Tailor your resume with those exact words and phrases.
Pro tip: put together sections at the end of your resume for soft and hard skills. Use those sections to shamelessly pad your keyword matches.
Our advice might feel frustrating if you’re used to applying to dozens of jobs rapid fire. However, by going slower on the frontend of the process, you are much more likely to gain more traction when it counts, during the interview process itself.
To be sure, when it comes to job applications, we recommend quality over quantity for knowledge workers. If you are spending less than 10 minutes on a job application, then you’re definitely wasting your time.