How Can You Get Past The ATS When You Don't Know Criteria (Because they're not in the job description)?

To get through resume screening databases more often, it helps to know the criteria being searched for.

Most job seekers assume (and most career resources teach) that the criteria are in the job description ... but most job seekers are wrong about this.

You see, job descriptions are almost never written by hiring managers, and their purpose is not to help job seekers get identified by recruiters.

Instead, job descriptions are almost always written by HR and Legal departments and their purpose is to protect the employer from HR lawsuits and government regulatory issues. They are standardized by general job type, and are generic across departments, locations, products, business units of a company.

If they are standardized and generic, how could they reflect the current needs of an individual hiring manager? (They can't).

Instead hiring manager's communicate their current individual needs to the recruiter who is conducting the search, who then develops criteria to search the Applicant Tracking System for resumes that match their criteria ... that are usually different than the criteria in the job description.

So how can you get past the ATS when you use the job description as your criteria, even if you use tools like JobScan?

Answer: You can't very often, because you're flying blind and using the wrong criteria.

Instead, you're forced to send a lot of resumes and hope you get lucky, a poor strategy.

Most career coaches, outplacement firms and other career resources teach you to use criteria from the job description because it's what they were taught in their certification training. It's a job search strategy, just not a very efficient strategy when you face a lot of competition from other job seekers, like you see in 2023.

What you can do is to learn how to discover an individual hiring manager's current needs, the ones that will be included in search criteria.

I help people solve the most difficult job search problems, including job search acceleration, getting past ATSs, ageism, remote positions, product/job function/career/industry/ geographic change, unemployment, "bouncy" recent career path, job search turnaround, seeking raise/promotion, industry in decline/consolidation, long term gaps, family leave, or other of the most challenging job search issues.

Join me for my next free Resume Webinar (enroll at https://x.resumewebinar.com/register for no charge) and learn how to accelerate your job search, so you can find your next job faster in 2023.

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