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HOW TO DEAL WITH THE APPLICATION TRACKING SYSTEM (ATS) Even the most qualified and experienced candidates can slip under the radar if their applications do not make it past the ATS. Understand how the system ticks — and what you can do to bypass it.
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t is already tough to land an offer for a job interview. Sometimes, it feels like you are just chucking applications through a black hole with no answer. Chances are, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is probably making this process more complicated for you. In this case, your application might be automatically rejected or so buried down the list that recruiters may not even notice it. While this is unfortunate, the ATS remains a crucial tool for most employers, especially in an era where a click is all it takes to send an application. Today, companies often receive high volume of job applications and it would be almost impossible for recruiters to deal with all of them manually. As a result, most large companies deploy an ATS to help streamline their recruitment process and smaller firms are following suit.
How does it work?
How to Optimise your Resume
An ATS does more than tracking applications and resumes. It also serves as a filter, scoring your resume according to its relevance and ranking it before passing it to a hiring manager or recruiter. But like every form of technology, this system has its drawbacks.
1. Format your Resume
For older systems especially, an ATS does not always process synonyms accurately. As a result, they can only spot exact matches, which can cause even the most impressive resumes to fall under the radar if they lack the right keywords. Thankfully, getting past the ATS is not an impossible task – as long as you can match its requirements.
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SUTD career guide 2022
A well-designed resume might be easy on the eyes and shows your creativity to your prospective employer. Unfortunately, it is not going to impress the ATS. At the end of the day, using an easy-to-read resume format and including specific keywords makes your resume more ATS-friendly. Traditional fonts like Arial might be boring or even unthinkable to use for creative graduates. But it is ultimately your safest bet when it comes to beating the ATS — which often has trouble processing fancy fonts and images, so try to keep images and graphics to a minimum. Keep to the standard resume template and stick to common headings and keywords such as ‘Professional Experience’ and ‘Skills’, as the ATS may not be able to compute uncommon headers.
For submissions, Word documents are most compatible with an ATS, so send them using this format instead of PDF whenever possible. Although it can be programmed to process and read PDF documents, reading errors can surface depending on how it was formatted — so it is better to be safe than sorry!
