More and more often, employers are using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to streamline the application process. This changes how you should write your resume. In this episode, Brandon, Clara, and McKinley will teach you about ATS and how to tailor your resume so you don’t get overlooked by employers who use these systems. Make sure to settle in with a yummy sandwich, and listen until the end for a Career Center dad joke!
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McKinley Hatch
You're listening to.
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McKinley Hatch
Career café, a podcast for all things career related to help you thrive in the professional world. Welcome today to our podcast episode Cracking the Code: Mastering the ATS Resumé Game. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what ATS is and how to make your resumé seen by employers and get through the ATS system. So joining us today, we have Brandon Street and Clara Webster and moderator McKinley Hatch, myself, experts in career and professional development topics.
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McKinley Hatch
Brandon, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us why you are an expert and why we should listen to what you say about ATS?
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Brandon Street
Well, I'll tell you this, and both Claire and I have.... Clara... Claire.... Yeah. Clara, We were just talking about this right before we came in that she doesn't like to be called Claire. And then I called her Claire for some reason... Clara and I have also been through a, a training for ATS systems and I've had a lot of experience helping people apply through those for over the 20 years I've been helping with, with career services.
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Clara Webster
So yeah, and I'm Clara and I'm a career advisor here at the Career Center working here with Brandon McKinley. And yeah, just like Brandon said, we've both been trained in how to kind of beat the ATS system and make sure your resumé is effective.
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McKinley Hatch
Awesome. So now that we know why we should listen to you, I hope I'm asking you. Tell me what ATS is. We talked about this in our recent episode about how to get your resumé seen. Right. And we briefly touched very briefly on ATS, but tell tell us what it's stands for.
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Brandon Street
Yeah. So ATS stands for applicant tracking systems. And you know, in 2008 I've been working in courier services world since 2004 and the recession in 2008, I really saw this come to light. It's not that they didn't exist, but they really came to light after 2008. And the reason is, is, you know, employers were getting I mean, thousands of applicants for one job because of the need for jobs at the time.
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Brandon Street
And and the applicant tracking systems or ATS systems were developed to help them through that process because I mean, you can imagine the task it was for HR Managers to have to work through all of these applications. And so these were developed to help them through that process, to identify who the top candidates were, to not waste their time and to interview those top candidates.
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Brandon Street
And that's allowing the system to do the work for them.
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Clara Webster
Yeah. And ATS systems, you know, they'll kind of create their own little like summary of each resumé that the computer generates that Yeah. Then goes to HR Recruiters and kind of gives them like, you know, whether the keywords they're looking for on that resumé or not and just helps them kind of filter through, you know, resumés that are not as competitive and also show them the ones that are competitive.
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Brandon Street
And hence the reason why it's so important to make sure that your resumé is targeted in a way that captures the attention of the applicant tracking system. And so we're going to talk more about that today. But I think you need to be aware of that. Not as important, too, as we talked about before. Customize your resumé for employers, but specifically for these application tracking systems to ensure that they're you're catching it's virtual, I.
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Clara Webster
Guess, and then making it to the human eyes.
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Brandon Street
Exactly.
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McKinley Hatch
Yeah. Clara, you touched on keywords. Why don't you dive into that a little further for us and why those keywords are important? And what do you mean by keywords?
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Clara Webster
Yeah, well, so with each job posting, you're going to see certain, you know, things in the qualifications or responsibilities that are considered keywords, right? So if they want, you know, a candidate that maybe has experience in a certain area or knows a certain software, you know they're going to listen the job ad And if you happen to match those things, you want to put those same keywords on your resumé, right?
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Clara Webster
You know, if they're looking for someone who is proficient in Microsoft Word, for example, and if you're proficient in Microsoft Word, that's a good keyword that you can put in there that the ATS system will catch and go, you know, they meet one of the things that we're looking for in a job candidate. And so that's why, you know, not only for just normal human employers, but also for ATS systems.
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Clara Webster
That's why it's so important to make sure you have those keywords on there, because if you don't, they're not going to see how you match that job.
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Brandon Street
And these really are designed a program to look for those. Right. And so it's important to learn how to, especially in this case, read a job ad, decipher what they're looking for, identify the keywords. And and truly they they they're not hard to identify if you look for them. I mean, again, it's as you talked about, some of the key softwares.
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Brandon Street
I mean, if they use the qualification section, it really helps with this. If they want some of the strong communication skills, you probably ought to replicate those communication skills, especially the word communication skills or the words communication skills in your resumé. And so it's important to make sure you learn how to read a job ad, identify those keywords and decipher.
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Brandon Street
Now, what we don't want is you taking exactly what they say and replicating that right. We want to use what we call reflective language. So taking what they've said and while using the keywords, writing in a different way, that doesn't necessarily reflect exactly what they said.
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Clara Webster
Exactly.
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McKinley Hatch
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Let's talk about formatting for ATS... like an ATS resumé, right? We talked about this briefly in our last one, but I wanted to re-address this. What should a resumé look like formatting wise to get through these ATS? You know, to... yeah.
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Brandon Street
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. And that's a great question because formatting is a huge can be a huge issue or it can be very helpful in regards to an ATS system. And so one thing we know is that when you're writing a resumé for an application tracking system or applicant tracking system excuse me, you, you need to ensure that your resumé is not in columns.
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Brandon Street
I want you to imagine this. This is basically what an applicant tracking system does. It takes your resumé. It will copy your whole resumé and paste it as if it did in a word document or a plain text document. Right. And the way that your resumé translates over is the way an applicant tracking system is going to read that.
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Brandon Street
And so if you have columns, you could already imagine what's going to happen to that. When it gets on the plain text document. Right. It's going to things may overlap. They may look weird and it may be difficult to read. I mean, as it's going through there, it may not make any sense. Right. And so we really discourage columns.
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Brandon Street
In some cases, we discourage your your information being and, you know, different types of non readable fonts and things like that. So you want to kind of keep those plain as well. And in regards to the most common types of fonts that translate from text to text, right, like your clip and area, those types of fonts that you can you can you can Google search the top ten resumé fonts.
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Brandon Street
And most of those are pretty safe for the Applicant tracking systems.
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Clara Webster
Yeah. And the other thing that you want to avoid with columns is also using things like any kind of graphics or tables, especially like text boxes. Those, you know, they're they're kind of popular on resumés where, you know, you want the design to look very fancy and nice. But the problem is, yeah, when a computer is transferring that over to a plain text document, if you've got any of those, it's going to confuse the computer and it's not going to be able to copy and paste what was either in that text box or in that graphic or whatever it may be into a place where it can read it.
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Clara Webster
And so it'll just mess up the whole recipe. And so with that, you want it to be kind of what a lot of people call boring vanilla resumés where they're just one column top to bottom. You don't have any pictures or graphics on there, You know, it's just a text, just important stuff. And those are really going to be your best resumés for ATS systems.
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Brandon Street
And you want to make sure that your resumés make sense. I mean, again, you're you're prompting the ATS system, right? And so you don't want to make up or create your own headers that that would make no sense. But you're trying to use fun buzzwords, right? Ensure that if you're going to have a you know, your section is education, say education, right.
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Brandon Street
Work, experience or experience, excuse me. And then and then summary and those types of things that that make sense to that system. But if you're creating headers that you're, you know, you're trying to have fun with and they're not going to make any sense to you to the system.
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Clara Webster
So yeah, keep it. Keeping it simple is usually the best way to go with these ATS systems. So yeah, don't create your own heading titles or combine them or anything like that. Just go with summary education experience as your basic ones. If you need to add another like a volunteer section or like an award section, you know those types of things the computer will be able to understand, but you know, don't make it too complex because then you’ll run into issues that way.
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Brandon Street
Yeah, Another thing is, you know, a lot of people like to use like Canva makes really nice looking resumés, right? They look really pretty, but they do not jive well with ATS systems. And so I would just recommend you don't use those types of third party resumé building type of systems because some of them are not good. And if you want to check again, copy and paste the over to a word document and see what it looks like.
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Brandon Street
But they usually like, again, a Canva or those other types of programs don't work well with an ATS system.
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Clara Webster
Yeah, because those ones Canva. Even if you download a resumé as a PDF, most of the time it'll still be considered a JPEG to an ATS system, and so only to be able to read it at all. So basically your HS response is going to be like if you use a Canva resumé, which we definitely want to avoid.
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Brandon Street
Blank is not good.
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Clara Webster
Yeah, like it's not good. Yeah. And so usually making your resumé in word or like Google Docs, that's a safe way to go about it. And then just downloading either as a PDF or even someplace except a word doc type of file too.
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Brandon Street
And I think the other important thing we want to point out is job titles, right? Like you want to ensure that your job titles are straightforward and make sense to an applicant tracking system. As much as we all love the old Subway sandwich artist job title, I do. I mean that we love it. I do. I think. I mean, I would love to have sandwich artists when I was younger on my resumé.
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Brandon Street
Right. But but it doesn't make a lot of sense to an ATS system. It's going to read that. And I don't think it can make any connection to how that's in your work. History is going to help with this what it's looking for, Right?
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McKinley Hatch
So yeah, this is all really good information. We wanted to dive more into ATS so our listeners can get a better idea of what what they are putting on their resumé and the way they're formatting it and the keywords that they're using and just having a basic understanding of why it is because I quite frankly didn't know about it until I was in college.
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McKinley Hatch
So I think it's very informational to know. So anyway, thanks listeners for tuning in to Career café Today we're going to end with a dad joke. Of course.
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Brandon Street
Yeah. So I don't know if you guys know, but I got a job at a bike shop, but I eventually had to quit that job because I was just too tired, so.
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Clara Webster
my gosh.
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Brandon Street
You're welcome.
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McKinley Hatch
See you next week!