What is an ATS?
What does ATS do?
Do companies use ATS?
How do I get around ATS?
Test your resume rating
ATS Explained
You upload your resume to company WEBsites, yet you are not getting responses to your job applications for which you have the required qualifications and experience. You are more than likely uploading your resume to an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), also known as ATS Robots are used by companies worldwide. So what is an ATS?
As the job vacancies become more scarce, generally, the job seeker numbers increase, the number of applicants per open job positions rises proportionally. Statistically, within days of posting, most employment positions advertised on job searching WEB sites can attract more than 300 applications.
A recruiting manager or a recruiter having to read through a large number of resumes and assess each one can take days whilst an ATS Robot will do it minutes. For this reason, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are increasingly becoming more and more popular. More than likely, when you upload your resume, an ATS robot would have read it before human eyes even seen your resume. And yes, ATS Robots do read them, and they do assess them but not in the same manner that humans do. ATS Robots are not physical robots, as one would imagine. Instead, they sophisticated programs with complex algorithms that follow instructions and criteria set out by a human recruiter.
The Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) will match your resume's contents to the job position posted. It will also compare it to any other search requirements that the recruiter has set in the application. Once the Bot obtains data it requires from a submitted resume, it will then rate that resume with a score value that matches that job position. The higher the score, the higher are your chances of being selected for the interview by a human recruiter or hiring manager. Recruiters or Hiring Managers will generally pick the top 5 to 10 applicants with the highest ratings matching the job position.
To help you understand ATS Bots and how they work, here are some simple explanations about them and the way they read and interpret resumes:
Firstly, they don't care what you look like, so inserting your photo or graphics into the resume does not help or mean anything to ATS robots. If anything, ATS Bot will skip over it, or it can confuse its algorithms and cause it to reject your resume entirely before reading the rest of it.
Once the ATS software parser algorithm has read through a resume and taken in the information it has gathered, it will format it for further processing and store it in the Applicant Tracking System database.
Among many things, it will obtain the history of your past job positions, duration in each job position, including start date and end date, education, qualifications, your hard skills, your soft skills, matching keywords and so on. The applicant tracking software will use the information collected to assess resume compatibility with the job position requirements and calculate a score between 0% and 100%.
To assist the ATS robot to understand your resume or Curriculum Vitae more clearly, identifying sections in your resume is essential, and they should include the following:
- Your Contact Details
- Your work experience
- Your education and certifications
Optionally you can include your non-work experiences, such as association with professional organizations, community involvement, etc.
When it comes to formatting your resume keeping it simple and straight forward is highly recommended. There are many resume template available on the Internet or included with word processing software such as Microsoft Word. Visually they may be very appealing, but to an ATS, they can be an obstacle and prevent it from obtaining the correct information from the resume. They usually contain hidden characters that ATS software can not remove, interpret correctly or make sense of. Keeping your resume presentable with simple formatting is the best option as it is readable by human recruiters and Application Tracking Software alike.
How do I get around ATS?
Companies using an Applicant Tracking System will generally not provide an email address for you to send your resume. Instead, you will usually be required to create an account and upload your resume or Curriculum Vitae (CV) on the company's careers Website or their Web page. But if you manage to obtain an email address to post your resume or CV to, unless specifically asked by the recruiter or the recruiting manager to send your details and resume to them directly. In that case, they will generally disregard your email and its contents. So, in other words, there is no way of getting around the ATS if the company uses it to sort out and rate job applications for any open position.