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Don’t get sucked into the bait-and-click world of “ATS Compatibility” and “Keyword ATS friendly templates” rabbit hole. Most of what comes through in a Google search or a LinkedIn feed about resumes centers around the myths and inaccuracies of an applicant tracking system. So many people ask me, "how can I beat the ATS" or "how can I beat the bots" so my resume is seen by a human?
I'm gonna hold your hand when I say this...
Resume writers or companies who are making you fearful of your resume not being "ATS compatible" are just trying to sell you. Your resume is most likely being declined because of other factors.
I had a client this week that purchased resume support from one of the big resume mills and it cost them about $750. As part of their sales process the mill promises free feedback on your resume from an expert resume writer and a “personalized resume”.
The feedback they shared included this statement: APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEMS CANNOT READ PDF AND MAY STRUGGLE WITH WORD DOCS. Their recommendation? Send it as a .txt file.
Please don't send your resume as a .txt file. When the recruiter and hiring manager see the raw, messy, unformatted .txt file you submitted, they're going to quickly move past your resume and wonder if you wrote it in dos (that’s disc operating system for those who are blessed to be younger than me!).
There's a 5 second test to tell if your resume will be parsed appropriately into an ATS:
Open your resume in a .pdf format.
Use the ctrl + all (ctrl + a) to select all the text in your document.
If you do this, and all of the text selects, including text in a header, footer, or other internal formatting... it is ATS compatible and will parse.
Parsing is nothing more than the system copying and pasting sections into the appropriate space within the software. Remember, an applicant tracking system is a contact management system at its core. It’s seeking to input high volumes of information into the right places in the system so recruiters and hiring teams can sort through, disposition candidates, and keep records.
Most applicant tracking systems, including Taleo (the most commonly used ATS in the US), have no issue with .doc, .docx, or .pdf file formats.
When you upload your resume to Taleo, it will likely go through an optical character recognition (OCR) software that converts your PDF or Word document. This is where graphics and heavy formatting make it really hard for the applicant tracking system to find what it needs, so it could parse oddly into the system, but it will not reject you because of that.
Most systems will ask you to double check the parsing to make sure they got it right before you submit your application. Every major ATS displays your resume to the recruiter, which is what recruiters look at. When I was in Talent & Recruiting, I always preferred to tab through resumes— scrolling through the candidate profiles with text boxes was too time consuming. I can’t imagine any Recruiter preferring to tab through text boxes instead of resumes.
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