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ATS = Applicant Tracking System

When you apply to jobs, your resume is not being sent to someone’s inbox, it is going to a computer application known as an Applicant Tracking System, also known as an ATS.

The danger of getting rejected by an ATS is NOT about keywords, it is about formatting!

If the ATS cannot parse your resume correctly (i.e. find your contact information and place it into the appropriate fields), then those fields are left blank and seen as errors. If the ATS regularly purges error submissions, then it will delete your resume with them! If it does NOT purge error submissions, it will create a blank record in the ATS, which is useless to us.

ATS Compatibility simply means that the ATS can read the content of your resume.

Even if you purchased the best keyword matching tool available and loaded your resume full of the exact keywords listed on the job description, they still cannot call you because they do not have access to your contact information.

A Real Example

Below is a real resume from a person who applied to one of my job openings today, the day I am writing this post. I changed the name to “Tim Plet” as a bad pun because the resume writer this person hired clearly used a resume template (Tim Plet, template, get it? Sorry, I’ll stick to resumes and recruiting). I left their formatting the same, however, and uploaded it into my ATS. First you will see the MS Word resume, followed by what I, the recruiter, saw in my ATS.

ABOVE: Nothing is hidden for this blog post, the screenshot above is what the actual resume looks like to the recruiter inside the ATS. The broken image icons are what display to the recruiter because the ATS cannot read the content of this resume. The lack of data makes the resume useless, therefore it will be deleted.

Speed Up My Search is an IT recruiting firm with licenses for two ATS, so we can actually test resume and share the results without speculating what probably works.

Comparing writers? Always Ask:

– What is an ATS?
– How can you be sure my resume will be accepted?
– Which ATS do you currently have access to?
– How many different ATS do you have hands-on experience using?

If they start talking about keywords, run!

If they mention keyword matching tools, run faster!

ATS Compatibility is NOT about keywords, it’s about formatting. Since most ATS are cloud-based and updated regularly, they cannot know your resume will pass if they cannot test it.

Somehow it was able to parse out his job title and company, but nothing else is visible at all. I wonder how many more applications this person has sent out using this resume! Thankfully, I was writing this article and needed to find an example, so I called to tell him…but he did not call back.

Saving Money on ATS Compatibility?

There are many “Professional” Resume Writers who use templates like the one above and boast about their ATS compatible resumes! They talk about their clever sections like the left column where keywords can be added from job postings. To their credit, it is easy to customize that column to score well on the countless keyword matching tools available. There is only one problem with it…

…NO ONE WILL EVER SEE THOSE KEYWORDS!

The writers using these templates often charge far less than more experienced writers ($250 to $300 per resume whereas the industry norms are 2 to 3 times that amount), but a higher price does not make one writer better than another, experience and true ATS access does.

In 2020, three people paid $850, $1,200, and $800 respectively to other writers before hiring me to rewrite them. At least 5 others chose to continue using their ATS incompatible resumes to “save money”. I wonder if they also save money while fishing by not buying bait? Hmm. One popular writer I know of charges more than $2,850 to write resumes using templates that are not ATS compatible!

Paying someone to write your resume who doesn’t have professional hiring experience to understand how Applicant Tracking Systems work from the employers’ perspective, nor the tools necessary to test for compatibility is like hiring your accountant to fix your race car because he watches a lot of races on TV! Yes, he will charge less than an actual race car mechanic, but I doubt that will lead to many victories on the race track.

The bottom line is that when a single document can impact the interviews you get and the salary you earn, then it needs to be done right. There are many good times to bargain shop, especially when you are searching for a job, but choosing a professional resume writer is not one of them. Find someone with hiring experience, and direct access to at least one Applicant Tracking System; your future self will thank you for it.