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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally confused by how much "ATS-friendly" matters, or what that even means.

On one side of the coin, it logically makes sense that ATS systems would help recruiters pare down the list. I'd assume there is some auto-rejection happening, but how sensitive is it (getting rid of clearly unqualified candidates vs. rejecting marginal candidates vs. actually qualified but still rejected due to not being ATS-friendly)? You here about job postings getting thousands of applicants and it seems like it would be impossible to go through those by hand.

On the other side, I see lots of posts from recruiters saying ATS's do not judge resumes and everything is done by the recruiter. These posts seem to be very skeptical of anything saying it will optimize your resume for ATS's because there is no need to actually do that.

Would love more perspective on this issue.

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As for someone looking for a new position, I can give you anecdotal evidence.

A little background: I have 10+ years of professional experience. Polyglot. Experience with extremely small to medium sized companies.

I re-used my previous resume, which did decently well around 2019 when I was looking for a new position, but with updated info for the newest position I had. Applied to a number positions that I was very qualified for -- crickets. This put me in a bad spot mentally, honestly, as it felt like signals that I'm just not "good enough" for fancy "big tech".

I then updated my resume layout to be more parseable (admittedly this is another variable), then signed up for a service that helps ATS-ify my resume. This involved adding numbers to certain line items, reduce repetition, honestly some good feedback in general. Immediate recruiter messages the next day.

I was extremely averse to using a service like this as it just felt "dirty" or was a sign of my personal ethics "giving in" to some sort of system. Honestly, I still kind of feel that way, but this is the game we play now. I know for a fact I've been auto-rejected from a number of roles that I was 100%+ qualified for because of my resume.

I didn't want to use an ATS service either, but it sounds like you had a decent experience, do you mind telling me which service you used?

I used resumeworded.com. I believe I initially found it on this thread [1], which also has a few more suggestions. I think they'll end up being roughly the same -- don't remember why I ended up choosing Resume Worded.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/resumes/comments/10icgzi/is_there_a...

So Search Engine Optimization for resumes.

Need to optimize your web site/resume for Google/ATS.

ATS optimisation is absolutely critical these days, at least in tech.

With the amount of applications you receive, the easiest first step is looking for a way to exclude someone. If your ATS can't even parse someone's CV properly, that's a great way to exclude it from consideration.

The next level is keyword matching. If your ATS can't find any of the keywords from your listing in the CV, another easy exclusion.

The whole system is completely bs, for both sides, to the point that personal referrals become more and more important. But if you don't play the game, someone else will, and you lose out.

> If your ATS can't even parse someone's CV properly, that's a great way to exclude it from consideration.

Why?

Is there some official CV format that applicants are expected to follow, which is guaranteed to be parsable by ATS, so that un-ATS-parsable CV shows incapability of following rules?

Look at it from the other perspective.

You're looking for a new senior developer, starting in the next few weeks. That means with your 4 rounds of interviews, you want to start the first round within the next week or 2. Your engineers have capacity to do the 4 rounds for ~10 applicants in that time.

You receive 1000 applications.

You don't have time to read every resume and start calling people in the next few days, so you build a tool to automate it. The tool parses text from PDFs, tries to categorise it into "experience", "projects", "location", so you can exclude people with <4 years of experience and not in your country, and find those whose projects showed skills you're looking for.

The tool correctly parses 500 of the resumes, and finds 50 who match your experience, location and skill requirements. Now you manually read those 50 properly, and reach out to the ones who stand out.

That tool is the ATS. You don't care about the 500 who couldn't be parsed, or whether some of the 470 were parsed incorrectly. It's not a test of the user's ability to follow rules. It's just a necessity to get hiring done in a reasonable time frame.

While I don't blame the hiring managers or recruiters or whatever (my team is constantly struggling with not having enough time/energy to hire well), if the only goal is to reduce the volume of applications, there are better ways. In fact this is just about one of the worst ways to do so probably, since it's pretty much arbitrary.

A simple way would be to make the job listing quite specific about expectations and say "Please do not apply if you can't do/don't know X and Y at minimum. If you can/do, submit your resume with a note affirming that you can/do." Any resume that doesn't come with that note can get canned, some people will lie, but you filter out the lowest effort applications which seems to me a better proxy for quality than beating your adversarial AI in a blind game.

What tool? Can you provide a link or name for the tool?

> The whole system is completely bs, for both sides, to the point that personal referrals become more and more important. But if you don't play the game, someone else will, and you lose out.

Seems to me that "great way to" in this case is sarcastic. It's a "great" way for HR people to solve the problem because it requires zero effort even if its stymies both applicants, and their own efforts to uncover worthy candidates.

In the end, as is the case with so much of our modern world, the root of the problem is some company overselling the capability of their AI-driven product and some executive with no accurate way to gauge the drawbacks saying "wow we can spend $x thousand per year for this service that will save us 3($x) thousand in recruiting payroll. I'm in." In the ATS world, resumes require SEO to be useful for most companies... that is, unless you're giving it to a human being that asked you for it because you already have a rapport with them.

The way ATS is growing, I no more know what a resume should contain. Are there any ATS standards?

IMHO, if you're really set on improving your resume, a service is worth it. Use one for the cheapest option possible and run it a few times on your resume -- you'll see the patterns and things it looks for.

In general, it would be things like:

    * Avoid repetitive action words - "Built systems, built software, built infrastructure..."
    * Add numbers/metrics where you can: "Improved site performance by 20%+" 
    * Line items should not be over 2 lines

Aside from that, choose a _standard_ resume format/layout. Don't get fancy with columns, colors, etc.

Before anyone gets too excited about keyword stuffing with white text and such: supposedly ATS systems detect this and dock you for it, though I've never heard proof either way.

You could sell an ATS system that randomly selected n resumes from the total and it would be almost as effective.

have you posted a job listing recently?

the amount of crap coming in is ridiculous, and nothing like a few years ago. people apply to anything from anywhere

looking for a full stack web engineer? i'm a senior data analyst on the other side of the world, and you have python in your job description, and i know python, and i don't have a visa, and you explicitly said you can't sponsor visas right now, but i'm applying anyway

once you've seen that a few thousand times, you'll realise even though it's far from perfect, automated filtering is a must. that's all an ATS is. some people get so turned off by the acronym, but i bet if they were on the receiving end, their first instinct would be to build their own "automated filter" (ATS)

Recruiters that say ATS does not judge are full of crap. Unless you get a referral, or you get manually hand picked from the pile, ATS will decide if someone actually reads your resume. If your resume is a 100% match and you still do not get a call then there are other factors to consider. The organization posting the job is full of full of crap. I have been automating the job searches way before the pandemic. Now, I maybe get a call or two with 100+ job applications. If someone can afford to stay out of a job, I would say watch from the sideline until things cool off. It is not you that is the problem. Anyway, tools such as this can be very helpful vs ATS.

The ATS won't judge a resume, but it will parse it and display in an easier format for the recruiter to browse through.

If your resume does not parse well (for example, a PDF with two columns can sometimes mean the right column text ends up above the left column text) the recruiter will have outdated / wrong information in front of them when they make the decision to do a screening call or not

I know because my cv had two columns for the longest time, and I kept getting recruiters call me "how's it going at <company I left 6 years ago>" and they had my latest cv

Kinda seems idiotic that we're making PDFs of our resume data in the first place then. I know that's backwards historically, since paper resumes came first, but at this point it should just be a JSON file right? Let the hiring company's automation ingest the data and spit it out in whatever readable format they like.

> On one side of the coin, it logically makes sense that ATS systems would help recruiters pare down the list. I'd assume there is some auto-rejection happening, but how sensitive is it

When you have 1,000 applications for a job you don't care much about false negatives (having the system reject candidates you might have wanted). Instead you want the software to give you 100, or even 30 resumes to sift through in the hope of phone screening half of them, interviewing only a few, and getting someone who can do the job as quickly as possible.

YMMV, but I started getting more responses when I switched from a LaTeX/PDF CV to a MS Word document with basic formatting (heading styles, bullet points, no tables).

I suspect that quite a few ATS were struggling to parse the PDF.

The automation causes them to miss a number of qualified candidates, but at least one gets through and thisisfine.jpg. These aren't regex strings. They key on keywords and make the stupid mistakes common with keyword filters.

Also, they make the hiring process worse. Know the right keywords to put into a resume and you can be a grand mal idiot, and you'll still get interview time.

I get the other side of it. No HR is staffed to cull through 1000s of resumes, but the systems meant to aid them, are poorly developed and tossed out the door in the name of PROFITS.

Note: Profits aren't a bad thing. PROFITS are, because they ignore everything else for the sake of PROFITS, hence the caps.

A simple example.

How many times would anyone here enjoy uploading a resume, then immediately after, having to either type in the entire fucking thing, or spend 20 mins "correcting" the horrific parsing. If more dev time had been spent the process would be much better for the prospective employee, but they didn't. Companies built half-assed parsing, called it done, and moved on.

Developing these systems into more than just the horse shit out there now would go a long way towards solving both issues.

Source: I've been Senior Technical/Hiring manager for most of my career.

I feel like when I apply for jobs via tech recruiting firms I sidestep this nonsense because I almost always get a resume lined up. It seems obvious to me that ATS is just like whiteboard interviewing, just a tool to trim down on candidates based on silly metrics. In my case I do plenty of web dev, if I am writing any algorithm from scratch I am most likely doing something wrong if its not available to me in some fashion.

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