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Comment by willsmith72 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

> 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.

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 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)

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