[ApplyPedia] In today's job market, at least part
of your job search will be done online, and you will probably submit your resume
to at least one online application. In these cases, the hiring
organization is probably working with Applicant Tracking Software,
ATS for short. From the hiring
organization's perspective, using an ATS makes a lot of sense. Whether it's 250 applicants for the job or
the average of roughly 150 people for each entry-level position, and almost 100
for each professional-level position. There's a lot of resumes to go through. Some large organizations, such as Google, receive up to 75,000
applications in one week. To the hiring organization, most of
these applications are basically spam. It's not like those 250 applicants or those 75,000 applications all
represent qualified candidates. No, most of them do not. In fact, to the hiring organization the majority
of applications sent in represent noise. It would be a waste of time
to review these resumes. You, of course,
are going to avoid this problem, because you are going to make sure your
resume is targeted to the position. And you're going to make sure you have
strong evidence of your competencies, because you're going to make sure
you genuinely want the job and are confident you can do the job, right? But what about all those
other applications? Hiring organizations are more than happy
to take advantage of a friendly robot, and ATS relieves them of much of the burden
of screening all those applications. Think of it as a resume spam filter. And ATS helps you as well
because it makes it possible for you to submit your applications online. These systems analyze resumes and rank
them according to the probability that the candidate will be able
to help the organization. By weeding out the resumes of
candidates who are not qualified, these friendly ATS robots make the hiring
process that much more efficient. So it's not surprising to find that
almost all large organizations, including up to 95% of the Fortune
500 companies, use an ATS. About half of all mid-size
organizations use one. This means you need to adopt strategies
to make your resumes robot friendly. You've already learned to
identify competencies, you've learned to ensure your target
position matches the job description. You've learned the importance
of mirroring language for competencies that the hiring
manager is looking for. You'll learn more about how to do this
most effectively in the next module. But for now,
let's break down how an ATS works. You submit your resume online. We're assuming it goes into
the organization's ATS. The ATS first parses your resume. The parser uses language processing
algorithms to identify the text in your resume and break it into strings
that can be machine analyzed. Spreadsheets, graphs, tables, and other
eye candy elements that are in vogue in some circles today are either ignored, or
they just confuse the recruiting software. Assuming the friendly robot
navigates through your resume and finds the text that
describes the wonderful you, the ATS outputs a series of strings that
includes information about your education, your contact information,
your skills, and your experience. These strings are run
against a list of keywords that the software is
configured to scan for. These are keywords that most likely
describe a strong candidate for the position. They typically refer to competencies or
synonyms of competencies. They might be phrases someone with
a particular competency is likely to use. They reflect the criteria set up by
the organization's recruiting department. Based on this scan,
your resume is given a relevancy score. The higher the score the more likely you
are to get called in for an interview. So that's what your
friendly robot is doing. Clearly, you want to choose keywords
that best match the job description. The skills and
requirements outlined in the ad for the position will include specific words
or terms that describe the opportunity. You've already learned to identify these
in related language in an earlier lesson. In the next module, you'll learn
about writing a keyword-rich summary. This is a further strategy that you'll use
to make sure your resume is ATS friendly. You can also use the summary to
write variations of keywords that improve the appeal of your resume
to those hard working robots. As a side benefit, keyword optimization
also serves to attract the crawlers that organizations send out to
scan resumes on sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and CareerBuilder. And remember,
when it comes to negotiating a job offer, you're always in a stronger position when
the hiring organization calls you first. [MUSIC]