Anticipating The Search Criteria To Get Resumes Through The ATS More Often

Want to get your resume through Applicant Tracking Systems more often? Wouldn't that help you find your next job faster?

Then you need to match more criteria.

The problem is that you've only been taught half of what you need to get your resume through the ATS. And half isn't enough.

You've been taught by outplacement and most career coaches/authors to modify your resume based on the job description - but that's only half of what you need to get you through the ATS. While this may help you match some key words, it won't help you match enough to get through pre-screening very often. In most cases, you'll need to match 90% of criteria to get your resume seen by humans.

There are additional challenges to anticipating job criteria most job seekers don't even realize they face:

1. The Criteria Used Screen Out Resumes Are Very Different Than Published Job Descriptions: The real purpose of published job descriptions is to protect the company from HR lawsuits, so most employers have them written by HR/recruiting and Legal. Public job descriptions are written generally, with the same description covering a broad group of jobs in different departments, locations, products, business units, for different hiring managers. But each individual hiring manager has different needs, so they send these needs to recruiters to use as the criteria to screen out resumes. On average, this makes the employers' real candidate criteria at least 50% different than the published job description.
2. Published Job Descriptions Aren't Current: The average employer writes job descriptions for almost all published jobs at least a 18 months ago (even for new positions), so they no longer represent current needs. Most job descriptions for replacement positions are recycled from the departing employee's responsibilities, even though needs have changed. Again, hiring managers communicate their current needs to recruiters, which become the real search criteria, which are very different than the published description.

This reduces HR's legal risk, but it makes getting through ATS screening, getting interviews and jobs much more difficult for you, when you depend on published job descriptions. Instead, it's part of what makes hiring processes so dysfunctional when you're job searching - because you're effectively applying blindly, without knowledge of what a hiring manager is truly looking for.

To get through the ATS more often, you need to do a better job of anticipating the real search criteria than just the job description.

If you want to learn how to anticipate search criteria and get through the ATS more often, attend my next free Resume Webinar: Beating The Applicant Tracking System. I'll show you strategies to get through and around Applicant Tracking Systems, based on actual employer hiring processes.

During my next free Resume Webinar, I'll teach you more resume/job search strategies to get you through/around the ATS more often, get more interviews, and find a great job by year-end 2024. While we're at it, I'll also show you ways to double your interviews, whether you're currently employed, unemployed, age 40+, changing careers, or have other job search challenges.

Join me for my next free Resume Webinar (enroll at https://x.resumewebinar.com/Registration for no charge) and learn how to accelerate your job search, so you can find your next job faster in 2024.

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