3 ms·
I like to chime in here with my own observations since I run/own a recruiting software company (SnapHop). We make career portals that sit on top of legacy or ex
by agentgt 10y ago
I like to chime in here with my own observations since I run/own a recruiting software company (SnapHop). We make career portals that sit on top of legacy or existing candidate tracking software (aka ATS: applicant tracking software).
From an apply process a resume should contain keywords and should be easy to parse.
What I mean by parse is that we automatically extract details from the resume and if the resume is too hard to parse this may minimize your chance to be noticed (the ATS does this as well downstream).
So ideally you want your resume to be a small plain document. That is either MS Word, or plain text. You do need the keywords because there are some ranking algorithms that some ATS use and sadly it is based on simple keyword matching. I recommend putting this at the bottom of the resume to keep the parsing happy (ie list of technologies used). Or if your resume you think is large perhaps at the top but a short list in case it is is truncated.
I stress small because the bigger the document the more likely systems downstream can fail (our system can handle 100MB resumes no problem... and yes people will upload resumes that large but downstream systems cannot).
Finally I think including links in your resume of work you have done is also beneficial. I believe it is the future of resumes. We are seeing more folks doing this and we already to some extraction based on this (ie github profile, github projects, blogs, linkedin profiles, etc).
In large part the resume doesn't matter once you have made the initial HR/Recruiter pass. So make sure you get past that.
- roninb 10y agoCould you elaborate on why you suggest an MS Word document? Every suggestion I've seen from recruiters and job placement officers (my experience is limited to applying to entry level and junior positions) is that it should always, absolutely be a PDF. Is this because MS Word documents are easier to parse (by SnapHop, not humans)?
- thenipper 10y agoPretty much. Most applicant tracking systems will do a better job with processing an msword document. Honestly it'll depend on the size of the company you're applying to. I manage the ats for a large NGO. We process 27k applicants a year. We live and breath by the fact the system can process those resumes. A boutique software shop probably doesn't care as much.
- agentgt 10y agoActually we don't have issues parsing PDF but rather downstream some old ATS are not very good at parsing PDF (particularly MS technology based ones that we push to). The other issue with PDF is that some cheap PDF conversion tools will just turn into an image and thus characters are lost. Most apply processes allow you do paste your resume as text and attach. I recommend doing both.
- melle 10y agoMy first reaction would be: This looks like a SEO hack "back in the 'ol days", where you would include relevant keywords with the same background color in your webpage :) As others have commented, I guess it's a good idea to provide context of skills and competencies by describing your previous positions. Maybe a separate list for "skills" would be an option as well. I came across some sites that required MS Word, which I still find weird, as extracting text from a PDF shouldn't be too hard as well.