Wondering why you're not hearing back from companies? Tired of hearing crickets?
Posted on June 05, 2019 by Giselle Bogs, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
When you apply online, you're resume is screened by a robot. There's no human being seeing your resume at this early stage of the process.
One of the struggles I hear almost daily is people complaining about not hearing back from companies. Usually, for every posted job vacancy, mid and large corporations receive hundreds if not thousands of resumes, and it would be impossible for a human being to screen through all that. For this reason, companies use “robots” to screen all incoming resumes. These robots are called Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and yes! Artificial Intelligence is taking over, and now a robot is in charge of your resume ;-). This makes things even more challenging, to the point that more than 75% of resumes submitted online never make the cut to the hiring authorities’ desk.
The problem is that for these robots to parse and understand the information correctly, resumes need to have a particular format (and avoid other formats) which usually people don’t know about. Today I want to share with you a little secret: stick to the KISS model: Keep It Simple (Simple) ;-). When it comes the time to prepare your resume to apply for jobs don’t get fancy, in fact, the more simple your format, the better. It may not look beautiful for a human pair of eyeballs, but it works for the robots, trust me ;-). The rule of thumb is to avoid all fancy stuff such as fancy fonts, fancy bullets, fancy charts, and everything that may look beautiful. Now, I’m not saying you need to have a crappy-looking resume, this is the last thing you should do! What I mean is that you need to keep it simple format-wise. There are many formats that look nice and polished, I get that, but most ATS won’t be able to “understand” them and in most cases they’ll “see” those formats as pictures and your resume won’t make any sense. If this is your resume guess what? You won’t be ranked as a strong match and you won’t hear back from that company.
If you need help developing your personal brand which having an on-point resume is a crucial part of, reach out to me. I’d love to help you as I’ve helped many clients! You can check out some of my testimonials on my website provided here on noomii and my LinkedIn profile.
