No, The ATS Isn't Optimus Prime. Neither Does It See "Pretty" Resumes.

When people talk about the ATS, I get the impression that many of them think it's some all-powerful AI super being that has the power to determine someone's fate ("I've applied to 100's of jobs but the ATS keeps rejecting me so it never even gets seen by an actual human.")

Or they think it'll see a "pretty" resume and think, "This beautiful lavender-and-teal layout with 2 columns, a professional headshot, cool icons, graphs, charts, quote boxes and the logos of companies they worked for, will impress the hiring team so I'll put it high up in the candidate scoring!", not realizing that the ATS, which is, in spite of all the amazing things it can do, is simply the receptacle that all applications are housed and where a lot of the activities that are part and parcel of the hiring process are done..

It isn't built to "see" how pretty the resume is because it’s built for parsing documents- meaning, it extracts the text by converting the files into machine-readable text files, breaks the text into "tokens" which are nothing but words or sub-words, and puts these tokens through Named Entity Recognition (NER)/ Natural Language Processing (NLP) which identifies and classifies names, dates, addresses, job titles, skills, etc.

It then removes irrelevant information or inconsistencies in the text (like all the fancy-schmancy aesthetics that you spend a lot of time adding to your resume), and what remains is organized into a structured format.

That's the technical reason why your resume isn't getting seen by recruiters.

I should probably note that Applicant Tracking Systems do have the ability to store documents (ex. cover letters, Letters Of Explanation, offer letters and yes, resumes) but if a recruiter has 100's of applicants to review, they'll be more inclined to move on to the next application as opposed to clicking a couple layers deeper into your file to pull up a resume. (Think of it the way you would if you were searching for the best donut shop in the city and you pull up a website that is slow to load. Would you let it load or would you move on to the next donut website that you've Googled?)

But what about those questions that the ATS requires you to answer when you're filling out an application? Those are knockout questions. Those are pre-determined and manually added by the recruiter when creating the job posting. They're added with the intent of narrowing down the applicants to the ones who do have the right experience or background, so it's still a human making the decision, not the ATS.

After a recruiter looks through the 100's of applicants to see which ones make it to the shortlist round from which the Top 15% who will be screened and put through the interview process are chosen from, the recruiter is the one who dispositions the applicants who don't move on to the next stage.

So, no, the ATS isn't rejecting your resume. It's either just unable to parse what you put into your document in the first place or the recruiter, on the basis of what they see on your resume, decides whether or not to move you forward to the next stage in the process.

(Side note: This is where I get on my soapbox and remind you to lean into networking, especially if you're fresh out of college or pivoting into a different role or industry, because your resume won't necessarily tell the whole story nor fully convey your transferable skills or your energy and enthusiasm.)

WHAT ELSE DOES THE ATS DO?

While the ATS isn't some AI super being, it is amazing at being an all-in-one digital filing cabinet, scanner, CRM, career site and analytics and reporting tool all in one.

I've posted in the past about the fact that even though it's been over a decade since I left the recruiting firms that I once worked for, the email correspondences between me and candidates, along with my screening and interview/feedback notes and those of hiring managers who have interviewed them, will live forever in those candidates' files, even if the company decides to switch to a different ATS for whatever reason, because the files can be migrated from one ATS to another, and whoever now works for those recruiting firms can see the history of every applicant who's ever applied to them.

That's reason enough for companies to use Applicant Tracking Systems.

I will take an ATS any day over how we used to do things because using an ATS is a lot more efficient than keeping mailed-in and faxed resumes from people responding to the classified ads in the newspapers, stapling and hole-punching them and putting them into folders, stuffing the folders into a filing cabinet where they take up space in the back of the office, hardly touched even when companies need to hire again because it's way too difficult to slog through them.

That, by the way, is what we had to do up until the late 1990's when applying online via Monster became a thing and the ATS became the norm.

DO PAY ATTENTION TO THE HUMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

When all is said and done, it's humans that review your applications and your resumes, not the ATS. Before you make any "aesthetic" changes to your resume, now that you know that it parses just the text, you also now know that anything that can't be scanned (like symbols, images, icons, text boxes, multiple column layouts) can throw what the ATS parses into the system out of whack.

This is why when you upload your resume, when you look at what it parsed, you end up correcting it because it tells you that when you're a fullstack developer named Morgan Jones, the ATS has you down Morgan Fullstack, and your work history shows your work history as Jones Academy.

The human who's reviewing your resume will be paying attention to what the text that has been lifted off of your resume says. Make sure that your resume conveys not just your story but also confirms on the surface that you have what it takes to do the job better than the rest of the applicants (this is where keywords are important), and you'll have a higher chance of moving to the next stage.

NOT ALL ADVICE IS GOOD ADVICE

Before you take anyone's advice to "make your resume look prettier", ask them if they think their suggestions would make your resume more parsable.

Chances are, anyone suggesting that you make your plain Word doc resume “prettier” doesn’t know how the ATS works, and they're assuming that it's no different from emailing a resume directly to a hiring manager (and it’s pretty much a given that the hiring manager is going to send it over to the recruiter who will then tell you that you MUST go create an account and upload your resume yourself, which means said resume still HAS to be able to scan properly) or presenting a printout of your resume in case one shows up for an interview and the interviewer doesn’t have a copy (which is a red flag, in my opinion). 

When in doubt, assume you're working with the clunkiest ATS in existence, and stick to a simple Word doc resume rather than gussy it up. You can upload it as a pdf if the system allows you to. But a "pretty" resume won't get you bonus points.

If you need help landing your job faster, without sending out 100's of applications, book a consultation at www.careercoachdezzi.com