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Resources of the Week!

People in our network are hiring!! Here are a few you may want to check out.

• Candidate.fyi is hiring their first sales rep!! I’m an advisor for candidate.fyi, and happy to make referrals here if helpful. Great opportunity for anyone passionate about improving the candidate experience (which I suspect is 100% of you!)

• Leah at GameChanger is hiring a Technical Product Manager (and regularly posts her openings!)

• Whether you’re an educator, or interested in working in education, Josh has hundreds (sometimes thousands) of jobs posted on his Job Board, and many of these jobs are remote with 6-figure salaries!

• And more jobs posted on our job board!

Also three more things:

1. If you have questions you want answered, please drop them here. I get a lot of requests via email and DM but do not have the capacity to respond consistently so your best bet is to use this link, and I share responses weekly in this newsletter!

2. DIYing that new resume? Here’s a free template! I shared other options here.

3. I paused networking chats but will pick them back up next week!

The Dreaded ATS

A day does not go by when I’m not asked about “the ATS”.

“I’m not getting interviews because I can’t beat the ATS.”

“I just dropped $500 on an ATS-compliant resume.”

“I wish recruiters would stop being so lazy and read resumes instead of using the ATS.”

Friends - there is a LOT of confusion around what an ATS is, and how recruiters are using them. So let’s break it down and put these myths to bed once and for all.

What’s an ATS?

At it’s core, an ATS is a digital filing cabinet - the same type of system pretty much any professional that works with a large volume of human contacts uses

If you work in sales, you use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system such as Salesforce or Hubspot or Pipedrive.

If you work in fundraising, you also use a CRM (which is the same as what those sales folks use except you might call it “Constituent Relationship Management) and you may use a specialized system like Raiser’s Edge.

And if you work in recruiting, you call it an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) - there are tons out there but names you might be familiar with include Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and the dreaded (IYKYK) Workday…

Smaller companies and start-ups often skip the formal systems and put together a set of Google Forms and sheets to gather this information - hell, I’ve recruited this way before! But as companies grow and are managing more volume and want more automation, they invest in a system that collects, organizes and tracks information.

That job application? It’s a fancy embedded Google form. And it goes into a nice interface that helps the recruiter more easily see your submissions - if you’ve ever used the individual response feature in a Google form to view a response, that’s basically what a recruiter sees.

The system also has a bunch of formulas programmed in similar to Excel, and automated communication templates that are the same functionality as mail merge.

The functionality in an ATS is available to just about every human with a computer - companies just package it together and make it easy to use for recruiting purposes!

So what happens when I apply via an ATS?

With many basic systems, your application goes into a virtual pile along with the others, and the recruiter scrolls through to review candidates and find some to invite to interview.

Systems DO have features that could make you think the ATS itself is screening applications - but that’s not quite true.

1. Knockout questions: A recruiter can set up knockout questions that allow them to eliminate people who don’t meet objective criteria they define. These are typically yes/no questions (“do you have work authorization?” or, “do you have at least 2 years of management experience?”). There may be a multiple choice skill-based question where the wrong answer eliminates you and you receive an automated rejection email.
   So yes, technically “the ATS” is reviewing your responses and eliminating some candidates. But it’s not any sort of AI-driven process - it’s similar to setting a conditional formatting or IF function in Excel.

2. Candidate Matching: A handful of ATS systems try to provide a candidate match score. Once again, this isn’t AI - this is aligning what the recruiter says they are looking for with what is in the application and resume. If you care to read more, here’s an Oracle article on how this works for their ATS, Taleo.
   What the systems don’t do is eliminate candidates based on this.
   Why? Because those who build the systems and those who use them (recruiters) know that these scores are generally really inaccurate!

So while these processes do exist, they are not AI-driven, and they are not “auto-rejecting” people for not having the right keywords.

Well then, why am I getting rejected or simply never hearing back?

Mostly because recruiters aren’t doing their jobs.

Some may stop reviewing once they have enough candidates.

Some may close a role and forget to send an automated email.

Some may be online the minute you apply and click reject making it seem like an auto-rejection.

None of this is OK, but it has nothing to do with your resume not being “ATS-compliant”.

Then why is this whole “beat the ATS” thing all over my LinkedIn and in CNBC articles and on Tiktok?

Because money.

A lot of the folks pushing these services also sell resume or career coaching services. This is going to be a lot less appealing if you feel like you have the tools to do it on your own.

Many of these companies offer an AI resume scanner. And personally, I think these tools CAN be helpful. They can help you create a decent resume. They can help you identify things that may be missing.

But what they can’t do is tell you what the recruiter is looking for or what expertise you bring to the role. And without that, they can’t create a strong resume that’s going to "'beat” anything.

My tip: use these tools as a guide, but focus your energy on describing your impact effectively, NOT on trying to match key words.

The recruiter reading your resume thanks you!

🙋Answering Your Questions🙋

Each week, I’ll answer a few of your questions in this section. You can submit your questions here.

Congratulations!!

This is really frustrating, and could you put you in a difficult situation if you’re counting on that income!

That said, I wouldn’t automatically assume that it’s bad news but I’m curious what reason they gave you.

If it was due to something like the manager being on PTO and needing a bit more time to get things together or lining up your start date with other new hires, then those could be valid reasons to change the date that set you up for success.

But if this was related to budget or having enough work for you to do, those are flags to me and I would probably reach out to some of those companies you withdrew from to see if you can re-enter the processes.

If you’re unsure, I would ask them. Have a transparent conversation about your concerns and hopefully they’ll be honest so you can make decisions accordingly!

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