Memory
You know you’re crazy busy when, not one, but two British career sites (one of which offered to pay me!) send you content to post on your blog and you can’t even take the time to compose a short introductory paragraph to accompany said posts. The good news is that I survived a busy eight weeks of work and school, specifically six papers, six quizzes, three homework assignments, two final exams, and a whole slew of reading – not to mention weekly and sometimes bi-weekly career events on the campus where I work (in between serving an average of 50 students per week), several new clients, and a job club catering to transitioning job seekers. I also barely observed to major Jewish holidays and missed two friends’ 30th birthdays, a baby shower, a wedding shower, and a lot of social gatherings. Needless to say, I am happy to have my life back and happy to be writing to you! Thanks to those of you who kept me in your memory during my hiatus.
Now on to the post…Position Ignition, a U.K.-based career-coaching firm graciously provided the following entry related to resumes and getting yours noticed by an employer’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). I think you will find that the advice is not all that different from what you might hear on this side of the pond. Speaking of sides of the pond, I am excited that the founders of Position Ignition offered to meet me when I’m in London next month. Career coaches uniting across the globe – how cool!
Post by Nisa Chitakasem of Position Ignition
The way that hiring companies and recruiters are storing, evaluating and shortlisting new graduates’ resumes is already drastically different than to when I was a new graduate. Before, a recruitment agent or an employer’s in-house HR professional would go through a whole pile of resumes that had been submitted to them for just one graduate position. As you can imagine, the individual sorting through these documents only had time to quickly scan each submission for the type of keywords they were looking for. The keywords they were looking for were those words and phrases that indicated a particular candidate was right for the position.
Manually skim-reading each application was never going to be the most scientific or sophisticated way of identifying these all-important keywords, so it’s little wonder that recruiters and employers have embraced new I.T. technology with open arms in order to digitize the process. Nowadays, anyone in the business of hiring and with sufficient resources uses a computerized Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to rank resumes in terms of how pertinent they are to the position they were submitted for. Whilst this is good news for the employer, it’s potentially bad news for you, the graduate job seeker, if you don’t know how to tailor your resume to get you the highest ranking possible. Help is at hand though, with these tips on ensuring your resume impresses any ATS.
- Start your resume with a concise summary that’s rich with keywords pertaining to the job you’re applying to.
- Follow up the summary with short, bulleted points detailing your qualifications and accomplishments, again including keywords that match up with the advertised position.
- If you’re not sure exactly what keywords are relevant to the role on offer, look at the job specification and candidate criteria and identify the words that seem the most integral to the text.
- Be warned that the most advanced ATS technology will take into account the context in which the keywords are used, not merely the actual keywords themselves. Surround keywords with content that actually describes your relevant experience and expertise.
- Don’t misspell words. Misspellings are bad, not because the ATS will pick up on them, but because it won’t. If you misspell a keyword, the ATS won’t notice that word and the word won’t contribute to your resume’s ranking.
- Similarly, it’s wise to avoid using abbreviations, because the ATS may not recognize them. For example, when talking about your degree, type out ‘honors’ instead of using the abbreviation ‘hons.’
- An ATS can also be confused by complicated formatting, so keep the format of your resume as clean and clear as possible.
- Including logos or, in fact, any kind of graphic on the resume is a big no-no for the same reason.
- How you send your resume is almost as important as what you put on it. Before your resume even gets stored on a company’s ATS, it still has to get pass the organization’s email security screening. Attachments may automatically be marked as suspicious so copy and paste the contents of your resume into the body of the email message instead of setting it as an attachment.
- Because of belligerent spam filters, it’s also important to watch what characters and letter-strings you include in the email. Do not, for example, include any exclamation marks or potentially spammy words/letter-strings in either the text of the resume or the rest of the email. For example, if you went to high school in Penistone, England it’s perhaps better to just say that you went to high school near Barnsley in England.
- If you have the option of uploading your resume directly to the company ATS through the employer’s website instead of emailing it, do so.
- Submitting your resume via the website may require you to fill in additional fields as part of the online submission. Fill these fields in even if they are optional. Recruiters often use these optional fields to initially filter out a percentage of the original applications. Make sure you survive this first cut by putting the relevant information into all the fields.
- As the resumes may get sorted out according to these optional fields before they are even opened and read, it’s worth including relevant information in the fields even if you’ve already put it in the actual body of the resume.
So what do you do once you’ve emailed or uploaded your resume to an ATS? Of course, it’s a case of playing the waiting game to some extent but don’t forget to keep an eye on your spam folders when you’re waiting for that email reply to come through. Often, an ATS will automatically generate an email reply to your submission and such an automated email may well end up being recognized by your email filter as spam, even if it’s legit. If you check your spam folder and find that there is indeed an email marked as coming from the organization but you’re not sure if it really has or if it’s a phishing scam, it’s always best to check before opening it. Call up the company to see if its ATS would have started automating replies by now.
Once you receive the email reply, attentively follow any instructions it gives you. If the company wants you to contact it to take your application further, contact the company using the method it has indicated and within the time frame it gives. You will not only be guaranteed a response by doing so; you’ll be guaranteed the fastest possible response.
By following these best practices from start to finish, you have the best chance of negotiating a recruiter’s or employer’s email screening system, spam filters and ATS with optimal success. With the ATS in particular, it’s important for first time job seekers to know that there really is no mystery to it. It’s as simple as giving the ATS what it wants and pushing its buttons—and if you’re applying for jobs you’re actually suited to, pushing all the right buttons is not that difficult at all.
About the author:
Nisa Chitakasem, created Position Ignition to help support professionals through their career challenges. She has co-authored a range of ebooks to help people through various career challenges including: How to Get the Job You Want, How to Ace the Interview, 125 Twitter Job Search Tips, 125 LinkedIn Job Search Tips and 135 Networking Career Tips.
You can also find more career articles from Nisa on their Job Search and Career Advice Blog.
[Don't] Blame it on the rain
First, let me apologize for the delay on this blog entry. I had my notes ready to go since my flight home from New Orleans last week, but I went into freak out mode regarding my upcoming Finance midterm (which was yesterday). You may be feeling the same way about your job search as I did about my blog, i.e. you know you need to work on it, but other things seem to be more pressing (studying for finals, planning your trip overseas after graduation, or savoring every last moment with your friends on campus before you go your separate ways.
Perhaps you feel held back on starting your job search because you just don’t know where to begin. Several of my classmates and two friends approached me this week requesting career direction and guidance. Whether you’re about to graduate or embarking on a “quarter life crisis” like some of my friends and classmates, it’s time to stop procrastinating (i.e. blaming your lack of progress on the rain, or whatever is holding you back at the moment) and focusing on planting some seeds to sprout into opportunities.
It is a common practice for me to absorb all I can from every experience, thus I took advantage of my sister-in-law’s creativity en route to the New Orleans airport last week after my career coaching training. I asked Julie, “How can I make the comparison between the four steps in the career coaching process (that I learned at my training) and the advent of spring. “Gardening!” she replied with gusto. To which I replied, “Wow, I know even less about gardening than I do about sports, [an analogy I used in a previous blog entry in spite of my non-existent skill and limited knowledge], so I will need your help”. Fortunately Julie and Eric’s suggestions made for a productive ride to the airport!
Assessment – Know the landscape and your tools
If we were in my marketing class, my energetic professor would ask “what are your key resources and capabilities?” Perhaps conducting a SWOT analysis on yourself is a little extreme, but assessing (or taking inventory – to confirm that I retained something from Accounting) what you have in your own professional toolkit (i.e. your motivated skills, values, and general career interests) will provide you with a level of self (or horticultural) awareness to determine where to go next.
Exploration – What kind of garden?
Before you start digging up your yard or community garden, randomly applying for jobs, and blasting your resume to everyone you know and all over the Internet, you should think about your options you have for your garden (i.e. veggies, fruits, and/or flowers) and what to plant. Conducting industry and employer research on-line and through informational interviewing is an easy way to understand what kind of organization/garden and what kind of positions (seedlings), are best suited to your personality, strengths, and passions. From a gardening context for me, this would mean thinking about what plant can I keep alive? Trust me, there aren’t many! With the exception of our childhood pets (hermit crabs and beta fish excluded), I have killed every living organism I came in contact with.
Focus on a Goal – Answer the “What and Why?”
Once you have assessed yourself and come up with a few realistic career directions, it’s time to focus on the best and attainable option for you. To take things back to the gardening analogy…if you live in Alabama and have to plant in red clay, you may be limited as to what you can grow in your garden. Side note: I only know about the red clay because we used to track it all over the carpeting in the cheap hotel rooms my father used to book in Huntsville, AL halfway through the semi-annual road trips to visit our grandparents in south Florida. Be realistic about your ultimate career goal as it relates to what you learned in the assessment and exploration phases.
Strategy and Implementation
After identifying a realistic career goal, it’s time to develop a strategy and start planting! This is the final stage where you map out a detailed action plan with specific deadlines. You may want to think about these steps as “stretch goals” that will help you achieve your main objective. First think about how you will get to the main goal and what steps you need to take along the way. When should each of those steps occur? If you are anything like me, without setting deadlines for yourself, you won’t achieve your objectives. This is also the time to think about who can help you obtain more information in order to arrive at each stretch goal. To revert back to gardening…this is the point at which I would call my mother-in-law, whose yard looks like it was transported from an exotic tropical botanical garden far from Texas, to offer me advice on how to make my community garden fit my needs. If you are an activator (one of my top five strengths), you have a tendency to just jump into things without doing your homework (i.e. skipping the previous three steps). Working through the first three before taking action is absolutely critical as it relates to your own employability and vocational happiness.
“Dr. Unemployed” Career Blunder – Our instructor shared the story about one of his career coaching clients who was a receptionist (without a college degree) with a lifelong dream of becoming an art history professor. In most cases, we were instructed to let our clients arrive at their own answers based on asking a series of targeted questions, however when encountering in a scenario like the aforementioned, we were advised that sometimes it is okay to step in to offer a good dose of reality. After a series of questions related to the timing of obtaining each degree and the availability of post-doctoral openings, Dr. Unemployed started to evaluate some other options. Moral of the Story: Having dreams is important, but do consider seeking advice (professional, if possible) before pursuing them.
Don’t Rain on my Parade
I grew up in the kind of household when any minor stressor led to a reaction on par with World War III. When someone had a problem, we knew about it, and we suffered while we were convinced of the validity of every last detail ad nauseam. Obviously, taking an optimistic outlook on life’s lemons was a learned behavior for me. The idea of making lemonade from the stressful lemons life sent my way (or channeling my "inner Barbra Streisand") never even occurred to me until I got to college and started taking Psychology classes.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend an excellent career coaching training this week, led by psychologist and Career Center Director, Dr. Katharine Brooks. We learned that although coaching is not a regulated profession, the concept of coaching has legitimate roots stemming from four different psychological theories. While I could easily transcribe many weeks worth of blog entries from the training (and these theories), I wanted to focus on the field of Positive Psychology as it relates to job satisfaction.
What is Positive Psychology?
According to our instructor, Positive Psychology gives us language to define happiness. The term “happy” means different things to different people, and as colleagues, friends, and family to others we should be leery of injecting our own definition of happiness into those with whom we interact. According to the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania:
Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.
Right now you are probably thinking to yourself, “what a bunch of meaningless fluff!” That’s what I thought too until our instructor shared research around job satisfaction, namely that optimistic people tend to perform better at work and are more satisfied in their jobs, with the exception of people in the legal profession (not all that surprising since they are trained skeptics).
The main idea is that by identifying your strengths, leveraging them in your work, and perhaps most importantly maintaining a positive outlook, you will be happier at work and in life. According to Psychologist, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, there are ten forms of positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interests, hope, pride, amusement, awe, love, and aspiration. We should strive to have a 3:1 ratio, i.e. three positive thoughts for every negative one. Check out her positivity test to see where you fall on the spectrum.
What does this mean to me as an Employee or Job Seeker?
Most people’s impressions of work fall under one of three categories or orientations according to Organizational Psychology professor, Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, and are explained in her article entitled It's Not Just a Job: 1.) Job Orientation (TGIF mentality), 2.) Career Orientation (primary driver is getting into the C-suite as soon as possible), or 3.) Calling (I’d do this job for free). For the record, I tried to download her unpublished dissertation (thus making me supremely nerdy) on the same topic, but it was almost $40. I hope you find the article sufficiently stimulating.
If you ascribe to the Positive Psych. mantra, then you may want to seek out a vocational path, which speaks to your calling or purpose in order to feel completely fulfilled. That said, many people are satisfied with a balance between their job, which fulfills the job or career orientation while simultaneously pursuing a passion outside of work, i.e. acting (through community theater), athletics (intramural or work sports teams), or writing (blogging or journaling). It all comes down to your values and where those values fall on the happiness spectrum.
Career Blunder: I met with a student (who I’ll refer to as Jamie) and her father several months ago who was pursuing a major in accounting. Jamie’s father was insistent upon her sticking with accounting as a major even though she had performed VERY poorly in two accounting classes. I try not to mince words, especially with parents, so I attempted to make it crystal clear for Jamie’s dad that it would be very difficult for her to secure a competitive employment opportunity with grades like hers. A week later, I had an appointment with Jamie, sans father. My first question was, “Are your grades reflective of a lack of understanding or a lack of motivation?” Her reply was “both”. Then I asked “on a scale of 1 to 10, how interested are you in majoring and pursuing a career in accounting?” I never got a number, but she made it abundantly clear that being an accountant was not her idea of a dream job. Moral of the Story: We all have external pressures which may prevent us from pursuing our dream job, but nine to five (or longer) is a LONG time to be unhappy. When you are unhappy at work it can permeate through every other element of your life (I have been there – it sucks). If you are a new job seeker, take the time to evaluate your own definition of happiness and what you need from a job to derive a level of satisfaction congruent with your values.