Speaker 1: Optimizing your resume for applicant tracking systems is a non-negotiable and drastically increases your positioning and a total list of applicants. If you're still updating a resume you've had for a decade, it's time to make sure that you have an ATS resume. Let's look at how to beat applicant tracking systems in 2023. In order to understand how to beat applicant tracking systems, it's important to first understand how they work. So how exactly do applicant tracking systems work? There's software that's designed to scan through all of the resumes received for a specific job and identify which ones are a good fit for that job. Think of it like when you go use Google or your favorite search engine or maybe you're searching for a product on Amazon. You don't want to have just a total list of every single product that exists or even the thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of results returned in no particular order. You want to know which one is the closest match to what you're searching for. What you want to buy, what information you want to find in your search or whatnot. Applicant tracking systems are the same. Companies that are hiring want the same thing that you do when they're searching for information. They want to know who the best fit is, who's the most likely to be a good match and they want them ordered in a particular way and that's where applicant tracking systems come in. Some people think this is cruel. It's treating the resumes like there's not a person behind them and I can understand that. If you don't know how applicant tracking systems work, then it can feel like this impossible puzzle to solve and feel like you don't have any hope of making it to actually getting an interview. So your resume is in front of somebody and you get a chance to make your case. But applicant tracking systems are really meant to help you make your case on paper and then find people that can best make their case for themselves or outline their background in a way that matches with the resume. I've been on the hiring manager side of boring through hundreds of resumes looking for ones that are a good match and the reality of how people apply now is a lot of people are mass applying. So I might be hiring for a data analyst job and I have someone who has zero educational experience, who has zero relevant work experience, maybe they've worked in retail, which are all fine backgrounds to have but that doesn't mean they're a good fit for the role that I want and that consumes a lot of time. So being able to narrow down to the people that can identify how their experience is relevant to the job helps me as a manager. And the good news for you as a candidate is if you figure out how to do this, if you follow the tips I'm going to give you on how to beat these applicant tracking systems, then you're going to land at the top of the pile of resumes. You're going to have a person looking over your resume if you actually are a decent fit or someone that should be considered for the job. Instead of feeling like you're at the mercy of ATS, let's shift your resume to really optimize it. Let's get into the details of how applicant tracking systems work and what that means for how to beat them. ATS is tied to each job. What that means for you is your resume should be custom to every job that you apply for because the resume that worked for one thing isn't going to work for the next thing, even if they're similar type roles. If I take that data analyst position for instance, one job description may request certain background and data visualization, they might request certain softwares, certain skills. The way that a different job application may word those same things could be different and each job gets different weightings for different criteria. So tip number one is customize your resume to each job. Applicant tracking systems like simplicity. This is good news for you. You're not going to have to get extremely creative on that resume. If you like me and I suspect most of us went through your entire educational experience being told you should always put things in your own words unless you're directly quoting someone, which is valid advice if you're in school and if you're writing papers and articles and whatnot. Resumes are the opposite. You want to use the exact wording that's on the resume wherever possible. This doesn't mean putting things on your resume that you don't actually have experience in though. What it means is as you tailor your resume to each job, change up that wording to match. So for instance, I talked about that data analyst position. What that might look like is one job description may say data visualization skills and go on to describe the skills they want you to have and another might say visualize data. Pick the one the job description is referencing and use it on that custom resume for that application. While applicant tracking systems love simplicity, sometimes simple isn't the best. This sounds like the exact opposite of the idea we just went over but stick with me. What I mean by simple isn't always the best is you could put skills as a list on your resume where you just have a bullet point list that goes through all those skills or maybe a typed out comma separated list that goes through those skills but that's not as powerful as if you actually tie those skills in on a job description and it's likely to increase your match in the applicant tracking system scanning. So instead of just listing out your skills in a single list, talk about how you display those skills in the jobs that you've had. Applicant tracking systems value clarity. There's been a surge in popularity of making really graphically beautifully designed resumes and while they're aesthetically pleasing and might make sense for very particular roles, for the most part they're not going to be what performs best in the applicant tracking system. Use clear common section titles like work experience instead of fun jobs I've had. This might sound obvious but you would probably be shocked at the number of people who get creative for the sake of creativity instead of considering how they can be most effective on their resume. Lastly, remember that ATS is only the first step. Once your resume gets through that screening, it lands on the desk of a person whether that's the hiring manager, the recruiter, or likely even more people than that. Somebody is going to be looking at your resume once you make it through the system. So the goal of beating the applicant tracking system is to get it in front of a person. You want your resume to look good in front of a person. You want them to be able to understand the skills you have, how you've used them. A resume that's easy for a person to skim through and has good spacing and draws the eyes to particular areas is going to do well when it gets past that applicant tracking systems and lands on the desk of someone. Get started. Build your applicant tracking system optimized resume. If you need help, I have a course out there. It is specific to data analyst roles in that it uses examples for data analysts. It talks about the content of projects within a data analyst resume but it also gives you an applicant tracking system optimized resume that you can use and walks through how to write every section of it including downloads. Check out my playlist on YouTube or I'll link it down in the description. Thank you so much for watching and good luck on that next application.