Explain how applicant tracking systems and recruiters screen a CV.
Take the CV you are currently sending to employers and open it. Select all of it, copy everything, and paste it into a blank plain text file. Then read down the file and look for your name, your phone number, your job titles, the employers you worked for and the dates. They should appear in an order that makes sense. Do this before you edit anything.
The pasted text is a rough preview of what screening software gets from your file. Before a person sees your CV, a program has usually processed it, and when the person does see it, they are short of time. The rest of module 3 rebuilds your CV for those two readers, the software and the person.
Picture spending a weekend getting your CV right. It has a modern two-column design, a bar chart to show your skills and a tidy header with your contact details, and the PDF looks good on your screen. You send it to fifteen roles and one replies. People in this position usually decide the market is bad or that they are not good enough. Quite often the CV was never read in the way they pictured.
Software that takes in job applications, keeps CVs in a database and lets recruiters move people from one hiring stage to the next is called an applicant tracking system (ATS). Plenty of employers have one, and larger employers are more likely to. If you have applied on a company's careers page, the form you filled in was most likely the front end of an ATS.
Once your file arrives, the system pulls out the text and sorts what it can into fields, usually your contact details, your work history (job titles, employers and dates) and your education. Not every system fills every field. Workday's parser, for example, does not auto-fill skills or languages, and Workday's own documentation says parsing results can vary with the CV's format and the order of words. A recruiter can then search the whole database by keyword, the same way you would search an inbox. Someone filling a supply chain analyst role might type "SQL" and "supply chain" and receive a list of candidates who match.
You appear in that list only if two things are true. The system has to have read your CV correctly, and your CV has to contain the words the recruiter typed. Get readability right before you work on keywords, because a word the system skipped or garbled cannot turn up in a search. Keywords are covered in Lesson 3.4, "Tailor in fifteen minutes, not two hours".
A widespread belief is that the ATS acts as a robot that throws out CVs by itself. Whether that happens depends on the employer and the system, and a lot of systems mostly store and sort applications. The risk you are more likely to meet is misreading: your details come out scrambled, go missing or land in the wrong fields, and a recruiter's keyword search skips past you.
Certain layouts give some systems trouble:
Tables and text boxes may be read out of order or left out. A two-column design may be read across the full width of the page, which drops a line from your skills column into the middle of a job description. Contact details placed in the document's header or footer area may never be captured. Words inside images, icons or charts, such as a skills bar or a logo with your name in it, are not read as text.
Not every system trips on all of these. A plain layout, on the other hand, gets read properly by nearly every system. Keep everything in one column. Use standard section headings such as "Experience", "Education" and "Skills". Pick an ordinary font, and write every date in the same format. Bring your contact details down from the header and footer into the main body of the page, and take out tables, text boxes and any words sitting inside an image, icon or chart. A decorative design does little for you with a recruiter and puts you at real risk with the software.
Wei Ling works in operations and is moving toward analytics. On her old CV, her name and phone number sat in the document header, and the page was split into two columns with her skills down the left side. She ran the plain text paste. Her phone number was gone, and her skills showed up partway through the description of her first job. The fix took her ten minutes, though the problem may have been losing her replies for months.
A human reads your CV when it turns up in a search or when it goes straight to a hiring manager. On a first pass, few people read every word. A recruiter working down a long list of candidates looks for your latest job title, the employers, the dates and any results that fit the role. When those are visible within the first few seconds, the recruiter keeps reading. When they have to search for them, many go on to the next CV.
Set job titles and employers in bold, or give each its own line, so they are easy to pick out. Align your dates and keep their format the same from top to bottom. Begin each result with a strong verb and add a number wherever you have one. Lesson 3.2, "Turn duties into results", walks through writing results like this.
The software and the recruiter both work better when the most relevant information sits near the top of the first page. Start with a short profile aimed at the role you want. Keep it to three lines that say who you are and what you are aiming for.
Below the profile goes your most recent and most relevant role, with your strongest results listed first. If you are changing careers, the most relevant thing you have may not be your current job title, so put first whatever links most directly to the new role. Older or less relevant jobs can shrink to one or two lines each. Someone applying for analyst jobs who still has five bullets on a retail job from eight years ago is filling space with detail that nobody screening for an analyst role needs.
Wei Ling rewrote her profile so its first line is about analysis and dashboards. Under her operations job, the first bullet is now the late-deliveries dashboard she built in lesson 1.3. A recruiter looking for analytics finds it immediately, where before they would have gone through three bullets about scheduling to reach it.
Once your CV is rebuilt along these lines, test it the way you did at the start. Paste it into a plain text file again and check that your titles, employers and dates still come out in a sensible order.
Save your current CV as plain text and check that your job titles, employers and dates still appear in a sensible order.
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