Having Nightmares About Applicant Tracking Software (ATS)? Here’s What Will Fix That.

One of the top concerns of jobseekers in 2018 is this vague, impersonal, robotic smoke-monster known as the Applicant Tracking System. For those who have not heard tell — whilst sitting around the campfire — of ATS, it is a software in use by 97% of large companies and 80% of small/mid-size companies to scan incoming resumes and determine whether they are worthy of moving on to human scrutiny.

While many job hunters are aware of ATS software, they don’t have a strong grasp on how it works or how to ensure that their resume won’t anger the system. For example, during a recent resume evaluation for a client, I noticed that his entire resume was formatted into text boxes. It looked fantastic, but when I converted it to a plain text file (which is essentially what an ATS will do to parse the document), the text all disappeared except for a few random symbols. As a result, this client, who had an extremely impressive background in Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime Prevention, was being rejected left and right because his resume looked like a blank piece of paper to the ATS software.

How to Fix Your Format for ATS

There is a LOT of talk about the importance of keywords for ATS, and it is absolutely true — but having a resume format that can be successfully…