The Business of You: Beating the Resume Black Hole

by Kenneth J. Weiss
June 15, 2005

You get a tip. You see an ad. You hear a rumor. A Fortune 500 company you've been dying to work for has a new job opening. You would be perfect for the job. The job would be perfect for you. After a little web surfing you find the posting on the web site. You dutifully cut and paste your resume and hit submit. Then - nothing. No phone call, no emails, no..., well..., nothing.

So what happened? Where did your resume go? Unfortunately it went to the same place thousands of other resumes go: a place called the resume database.

If you want to beat the odds, you need to know how the system works. First, take a look at the numbers: A typical Fortune 500 company gets over 100,000 resumes per year. Some get two, three or four times that many. An in-demand job may receive several thousand applicants. Whenever you enter your resume into their web site it is actually passed into the company's Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. The ATS allows companies to handle piles of resumes, sort them, search them, and hopefully mine your resume from the sea of applicants. In addition to resumes submitted through the company web site, the ATS also serves as the final resting place for resumes from third party employment sites and other sources.

Having the ideal resume is no longer about power words, font choice, paper stock or interesting layouts. If you want to percolate to the top of the digital stack, it's all about being findable. To get started, you'll need to create two versions of your resume: one version to enter into the system and the other to take to your interview. The content needs to be similar for both, but the approach needs to be dramatically different.

Creating the Perfect ATS Resume

Be Clear - Make sure you use industry-accepted terminology when describing your jobs and abilities. The recruiter or hiring manager inside the company uses keyword searches or concept searches to find applicants in the ATS. Cute phrasing and clichÈ terms are not what they use as search terms.

Be A Big Target - Thoroughly describe each past position using lists of terms under labels such as "areas of responsibility." More words will create a more findable resume. A word of caution - don't dilute your resume with too many words or you will not score highly as a search result for any particular term.

Make Yourself A Match - Tweak your resume for each job posting. Make sure you thoroughly discern their ideal candidate and lace your resume with terms that match both the posting and your analysis.

Read The Instructions - Databases like nice, consistent information. By following the rules and tips, you can help assure that your resume is entered into the system in the cleanest, most visible way possible. Don't be surprised to see that step one is converting your resume into a plain text file (.txt). Also, double check the job reference number; this is often the recruiter's first data point for screening the resumes.

Throw Away the Formatting - You'll have a chance to use your spiffed up resume in the interview. Keep your ATS version simple: No bullets, tables or complicated indents. Most formatting like bold and italics will be stripped out by the system.

Be Patient - Cutting and pasting your resume into an ATS system can take a while. Some systems have separate fields for every job title, time period, description, etc. You may have to slog through multiple screens. Check the navigation on the page and follow it exactly! Back button problems can leave you wondering if your data was erased or already added to the system.

Create Your Plan B - Find a resource to build you a simple web site where you can show your resume as a plain web page and post it as a PDF and Word document.

You'll still need a good suit, firm handshake and the cool to put an intelligible sentence together, but beating the ATS may be your key to getting in the door.