Beat the Bots, Impress the Boss: Modern Resume Tips That Work

Lori Cole (00:04):

So let’s go ahead and get started. My name is Lori Cole. I am a certified career coach and advisor and content creator and brand ambassador here at iHire. And I want to welcome you to today’s session. Beat the Bots, impress the Boss, modern Resume Tips that really work. So before we get started, let me point out a couple more features of the webinar platform that we’ll put you in the driver’s seat. Those widgets that you have at the bottom of the screen and on the screen will allow you to move and resize your windows and explore content related to today’s presentation. So finally ask a question widget. You can submit a question for us at any time during the presentation. Only Alexia, our producer will see that question and we’ll answer as many as we can after the webinar. And then also keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow for a recording of this webinar.

(01:04):

So yes, we are going to send you a recording so that you can watch it and look at the examples and just watch it at your leisure. With that, I want to welcome Laurie Ballow. Lori is today’s presenter and she is a certified advanced resume writer here at iHire. She’s been with us since 2010 and she is known as our Swiss Army knife because she knows everything about everything from both the candidate and the employer perspective. So she has a very solid understanding of the job search process from both perspectives. Really welcome Laurie. It’s so good to have you.

Laurie Ballow (01:47):

Thank you Lori.

Lori Cole (01:49):

Alright, we are going to start this off with a poll. How often do you customize your resume for each job? Is it always most of the time, sometimes or never? And there is no shame here if you put just sometimes or never because that’s the whole point of the webinar today. We know it’s a big pain to do it and we want to give you some options to maybe make the process a lot easier and better. So while we’re waiting for those resume results, let’s go over the agenda. What we’re going to do today, we’re going to talk about how to get past applicant tracking systems and ways AI can help you write your resume and what human readers are looking for and really everything in between. So we’re going to run through what an A TS is, how it works and why hiring teams use it. It really does save HR managers a lot of time. How do identify the right keywords, work those into your resume and where to put them ways to use AI to quickly create a strong resume that’s still authentic and accurate to your career and your voice. How to ensure that your resume is still appealing to the human reader and gets you put into the yes pile. So let’s look at our poll results.

(03:25):

Alright, we’ve got some mixed results here. That’s okay. Sometimes most of the times seem to be the winner, but that’s really good because at least you know that you have to change your resume for every job that you’re applying to and that’s the whole purpose of today’s webinar. As I said, I know that changing your resume is a big pain, it’s time consuming, but it really is worth it in the end instead of just the model where you throw out a bunch of generic resumes, really the more targeted that resume can be the better. And now we have AI to assist us with this. So Laurie, before we jump into starting to change our resume, I think we need to understand why we want to change it for each job. So educate us on how those systems, these ATS systems work.

Laurie Ballow (04:21):

Sure. So an applicant tracking system is a software program that is designed to select the right resumes and kick everybody else out. It’s to make lighter work for HR managers for recruiters, the assistants maybe that are doing that first pass and they’re based on keywords. So somebody programs that a TS to look for certain skills and qualifications and if you don’t play the game correctly, you could be the best person for the job, but if that machine doesn’t know you’re the best person for the job, you don’t get through, you don’t get that interview, right? So the goal here is to play the game correctly so that you can get through that first gate because it can be a tough one, right? Sometimes you might, you just applied for a job and you get that automatic thanks but no thanks. That’s probably an A TS, right?

(05:11):

That means it looked very quickly a human didn’t look at it that quickly. It was software that it went through, it kicked you out and sent you a rejection letter and we’ll keep your resume on file. But what you want to remember is that this is not like space age concept anymore. It used to be even 10 years ago, the people who had an A TS were the Coca-Colas, the enterprise company IBM people did not spend many thousands of dollars to have these things 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. But it’s getting more and more affordable to the point where small businesses can have software packages that will do this. So don’t assume that because you’re not applying to a Fortune 500 that there’s not going to be an a TS involved because one’s made specifically for small businesses. So we’re here to help you figure out how to play this game correctly so that you can land those interviews.

(06:10):

So how do we know what those keywords are? You want to read your job ads very carefully. You’re going to go through with a fine tooth comb and you’re going to look for all the requirements, the nice to haves and the must haves, both the qualifications they want, the duties you’ll be doing if they mention something a number of times, you know that that’s really important. Look at their company values and the culture because if they’re talking about teamwork and a customer focus, you want to make sure you’ve got teamwork and a customer focus in your resume. The goal here is to show as close alignment to that job ad as possible. Now you certainly can’t use things that aren’t accurate, but if you have it, if it’s inside of you, make sure that you’re using that language. Use technical skills and soft skills and that goes for software as well as attention to detail and that sort of thing. And I forgot what my last bullet was there.

Lori Cole (07:20):

I think I changed the slide too quick on you

Laurie Ballow (07:20):

Here. I know I was. So one of the things you might want to think about if you’re a career changer, if you are a new grad and you don’t have a lot of these skills in your work base experience, think about your coursework. You can list coursework, you can list if you’re working towards a certification, include that that certification is in progress. Note that it’s in progress. Note that anticipated graduation date or completion date is such and such. That way you’re working those keywords in without having actually had a paid job. It doesn’t matter if it was paid, right? If you have a project where you did that thing, if you did a volunteer work or an internship, include those things so it doesn’t have to be what was actually in your own experience. Okay, so now you can put that other slide up. Sorry about that. No, that’s fine. Sorry. So this is how if you go through and highlight an ad, this is what it might look like, right? And then we’re going to come back to some of this stuff when it comes to the AI piece. Alright, so if sometimes job ads aren’t written the greatest, so you might have to dig in a little bit and do some research to find out what some of the coveted skills are and make sure that you’re using the same language whenever possible.

Lori Cole (08:45):

Alright? All right. Did I jump too fast on this list?

Laurie Ballow (08:48):

We’re good. How do you incorporate these words? How do we use this in our resume? Back in the day, in the early days of ATSs, they would say just do keyword stuffing. People would put lists of keywords at the bottom of their resume. Sometimes there was kind of a joke that you could use white ink so that the computer would see it, but the human eyes, we don’t do that anymore. You’ve got to play the right way and that’s to be authentic, to be yourself really genuine. And there are ways that we can do this that are highly effective and based on research of how people read resumes. So you can incorporate it into your job title, your job title on your resume. As you can see here, should match the one that you’re applying to. Now if it’s something new, you don’t want to go too vague.

(09:36):

If you’re too vague, it won’t show that it matches. I don’t want to say culinary professional if I’m applying for an executive chef job and a hospitalist nurse practitioner. If you’re just a nurse practitioner, you might not be a hospitalist. So make sure that you’re being as specific as you can. The summary is your three to five sentence description of what you’re bringing to the table and how you match that job. You don’t need to talk about things that you did long ago that aren’t relevant, but this is a place where you can address some of those keywords and then in your skill section you can drop more in that section whether they’re soft or hard. As you can see in the one in the background, there’s computer skills. I know it’s hard to read, but computer skills are listed in italics underneath the other skills so that you can kind of group them together.

(10:26):

I know I don’t like to see a mishmash of software and soft and hard skills all mixed into that top group. So it’s nice if you can pull the software stuff out separately, then you’re also going to talk about these things. You can’t put skills in there that you can’t back up. Don’t put it in there if you have never had any experience with it or if it’s not relevant because you’re going to have to talk about it later. So make sure that you’re including this type of language in your experience section to show that you’ve demonstrated those skills on the job or in your coursework as we mentioned earlier in your achievements because you’re going to have a bulleted achievement section that also are under each of those jobs that should also address some of these skills and then your education, if they’re asking for certain education, make sure you have that on your resume.

Lori Cole (11:17):

I really like your idea of separating those soft skills from the hard skills and putting them in italics. I’ve never thought about that before, but that’s a great tip and trick. I think one of the main things that you said was you see on this example where it says executive chef, I always tell my career advisor clients to put the exact title of the job in that they are applying for two reasons. It helps with the keywords on your resume, of course for the ATSs, but then it also helps to connect the dots for that human that’s looking at your resume. So you have to think about it from their point of view. They might look at a hundred resumes a day and if they’re hiring for an executive chef, that just helps them to automatically say, oh, we know exactly what this person is applying for and they can make a faster decision on putting you in the yes pile.

Laurie Ballow (12:26):

That’s right. And remember that neither the software or the human will connect dots. You have to connect the dots for them. I know you know your own history, so in your mind, because you did this, you’d be good at that and because back then you did this thing, you have to connect it, make it very obvious, spell everything out, this is why I’m a good match. So that connecting the dots is so important.

Lori Cole (12:54):

Alright, we’re going to do another quick poll here. Have you used AI to help you create or improve your resume? Yes or no? Unsure is also an option here.

Laurie Ballow (13:07):

I should know that Lori is an early adopter of ai. She’s been using it for years and she has coached many of us here at I hire on how to incorporate it into our jobs and what we do. So I am still pretty green at prompting, but she’s helped me and I’ve gotten better at it as a result.

Lori Cole (13:25):

Well, I think that the key is if you’re not really sure where to start with prompting, you can actually ask the AI, how should I prompt you? Write your own prompt. This is what I want to accomplish. So write the prompt for that particular for what I’m trying to do and it will add so much to it and make your prompt so much smarter. I love

Laurie Ballow (13:50):

That. Oh, and I love the emojis. It is. I know it is a golden tip. Let me tell you.

Lori Cole (13:56):

Yeah,

Laurie Ballow (13:57):

It’s good.

Lori Cole (13:57):

Alright, let’s see. Oh, we’ve got a lot of AI users out there. I’m so excited. And that is really up from some of our other webinars that we’ve done where we’ve asked people these questions and the AI is just baked into so many of the programs and processes right now. So good for you guys. Wonderful. And if you haven’t been using it, it’s time to start. It’s time to start looking at it because you don’t want to get left behind on this whole AI thing. So Laurie, how can the AI help us get past the applicant tracking systems?

Laurie Ballow (14:44):

Well, number one, I think AI is a great way to get unstuck. I think so many of us get really stuck on getting started, especially if you’re starting from nothing or if your resume is super outdated and you haven’t looked for a job in a while, it’s not a matter of just adding in your most recent job, where do I start? How do I get unstuck? Use what you have or create something rudimentary, but that includes your experience and stuff and upload that and then also feed a job ad that you want and let AI do the work for you. But again, it’s the tricky parts, the prompts. So ask it to update your resume to make sure that it is only using the information that you give it and if it does provide additional information, ask for its sources, make sure it quotes the sources by giving it information, you will get less hallucination because it’ll make stuff up if you don’t give it to it and you’re always going to proof it anyway.

(15:46):

You’re always going to look at it from different eyes, but you want to make sure that you are giving it as much info as possible and you’re validating what they write. Now here’s the thing is AI can be really verbose, so you might have to prompt it to be concise and there are a number of things that will help you to consolidate and we’re going to get to that I believe on the next slide. If you don’t have a lot of information, you could also ask it to research the company and find out where your skills align or the kind of skills that they really covet for this role because again, if the ad wasn’t written super well, you might need to rely on AI to dig a little bit deeper.

Lori Cole (16:29):

I read an article a couple of days ago about why AI makes stuff up and I think that this is an important thing for people to know because we’ve all heard about hallucinations and AI making stuff up for a long time, but we really didn’t have the basis about why it did it. So this article said that when engineers start to develop ai, it gives the AI points for getting something right. So AI wants to get as many points as possible for getting something right. So if it doesn’t know something, it will make something up or it’ll give it its best guess. So it’s really a predictive model. It’s trying to give you its best guess all of the time about what you’re going to ask next, what you’re going to say next. So it doesn’t get points for saying, oh, you know what, I really don’t know that, or I really don’t think that I don’t have enough information for that. That’s why it tries to give you the best guess and that’s why you see some things that are not quite right in it sometimes. So I think that is an important thing for us to know.

Laurie Ballow (17:50):

It’s good to know also. So once you’ve used this for your resume and you’re kind of happy with what you have or maybe you’re fairly happy with what you’ve got already, you can ask it to identify gaps. Are there any gaps? Is there anything I’m missing? Is there anything I could expound upon? Any other insights? Do I have skills on here that are obsolete or no longer relevant? Those kinds of questions. So really think you’re going to have to get a little bit deeper than just surface right me a resume and those are the kinds of things that are going

Lori Cole (18:23):

To tighten it up.

(18:24):

I jumped the gun on our job x-ray demo here. So I’m going to show you the job x-ray tool that we have on I hire and this will really help you to be able to look at those keywords. So here we go, push this live. All right, so we are in an actual job of a candidate here on I hire. And you can see up here at the top it’ll say, show me my matching and missing skills use job, but I just want to scroll down and show you what this looks like without it. So with that, when you toggle on that button, it is going to start showing you your matching skills from your resume in green and your missing skills in red. So that really helps to kind of pop that out for you and give you a quick at a glance about how you should change your resume.

(19:34):

Now I’m going to show you how you can look at your resume match score right now it’s 82% and you can score multiple resumes if you have them in our system. You can score those resumes and it’ll tell you what your different skills are, the hard skills, soft skills, technical skills, and then if you’ve built a resume in our system, we give you a really quick tool to optimize it. Here are all of the skills on the left hand side that I want to put on my resume from the job description and then the stuff on the right hand side is what was in my resume, but really didn’t need to be there. And this is the skills section. It’s actually changing the skills section in your resume. I’ve highlighted it there and it took my resume from an 82 to a hundred percent and then you can go on and save this resume and apply to the job and this makes it so much easier, but you have to have a resume built in our resume builder in order to do that.

Laurie Ballow (20:49):

Love that. And that resume builder, you guys is fantastic. It saves so much time and with the introduction of AI in there, I mean it’s really evolved over the last few years. It has it’s really cool tool. Can’t say enough about it, not because of our, but it’s truly good

Lori Cole (21:07):

Making great improvements all the time. We also have a cover letter builder that’s phenomenal too, so yay, we’re getting a lot of emojis on that. So Laurie, how do we make our resume so that it sounds like us, it sounds authentic.

Laurie Ballow (21:24):

Yeah, this is the thing about ai. A lot of times it’s really easy to detect and you don’t want to sound like a robot, so you want it to sound like it’s in your voice. A lot of times AI can be super verbose, like crazy formal and even sometimes using British terms and things like that depending on what program you’re using. But you really want to make sure that you are reading and it’s sounding like you, that it is accurate and actually representing skills and experience that you actually have. If something is super awkward or you don’t understand it, get rid of it. So there’s an editing process here. You want to make sure that all the dates and really go over it with a fine tooth comb and make sure that all the details are right. Anytime you fed it a resume or a document that you created, you’ve got a better shot at getting the details correct.

(22:21):

It’ll be less apt to make things up if that’s the case. And like I said before, and as Lori shared, get very specific with your prompts. Use only these documents, use only the information that I gave you. Please condense this or let me know if I have any gaps. Those kinds of specific things really it understands what to do with that information. You’ll be likely to get a better result. And if you don’t know, and this is not really related to resumes, these are formal documents, they’re business documents and they should sound like a business document, but if you are writing an email or something, you can prompt it to be more casual or more formal, more friendly, more playful, these kinds of things. So just depending on your audience, but in this case it’s really nice to have AI related to a resume generating tool, something that’s designed for resumes and career search because it’s going to get most of those things. It’s not going to be the wrong format, the wrong tone, that sort of thing. You always want telegraphic writing, which takes out the us, the pronouns, us all those little tiny words and if you’re using a resume based program, it’s going to understand that.

Lori Cole (23:40):

One of the things that I found when I’ve used chat GPT to write somebody’s resume is that it always wants to start the summary section with I did this and I did that, and you don’t want to use the first person. So I’ll have to go back and say, Hey, this is for a resume, even though I’ve already told it that this is for a resume, we don’t want to use first person and sometimes it’s taken it a couple of times to understand what I’m saying, but that’s where I should have said, tell me how to prompt you. So this is in regular resume format and it’s not first person.

Laurie Ballow (24:22):

I just helped a job seeker with actually a friend with a resume that every sentence started with I did this, I did that I was responsible for. It’s not a letter and concision is really important. The name of the game here is to tell your story in as few words as possible and the story that matters, not the whole story, but just what matters to them.

Lori Cole (24:44):

And I don’t know if you’ve said this, but we’ve talked about it before. Your resume is really your marketing document. It’s not your whole life history, it’s not your whole bio.

Laurie Ballow (24:54):

Yep.

Lori Cole (24:56):

One other thing I will tell you, never copy and paste directly from ai. I mean you can copy and paste, but you’ve got to edit that. You have got to go through it with a fine tooth comb. Like Laurie said, one of the telltale signs that it’s AI are those longer dashes that you see and I am seeing them in news articles and all over the internet and I see them on resumes too, but usually people, I don’t even know how to put a longer dash into a document on my keyboard. I think is it alt 0 1 5 0 or something like that? I don’t know.

Laurie Ballow (25:39):

I learned it at one time, but I don’t use it really much anymore.

Lori Cole (25:44):

But that is a telltale sign that it was created with AI because AI loves to use those. So make sure that you’re really going through and editing those documents. I’m sure that there are some cases where you would want to use them, but for the most part it is a sign that it was done with ai.

Laurie Ballow (26:06):

And there’s a little side note, it is really good to use AI to help you prepare for an interview, but don’t use it while you’re in the interview. We actually had a candidate who interviewed with AI paused, he’s on camera and he’s pausing his answers and waiting for AI to show up on his other screen and then he’s clearly looking at the other screen and reading the answers. Is that crazy? That’s happening. So I’m just putting it out there. Not that any of you would do that, but it can be a good tool for interview prep for sure.

Lori Cole (26:38):

Well there are software apps now that will do that for you where you’ve got the interviewer on your screen and at least these are sophisticated enough to put at your answers on the same screen so you’re not looking back and forth. But yeah, there are software apps that will help you with the interviews now. So that’s crazy. But you’re right, the more authentic that you can be in your interview, the better you can tell interviewers can tell. Alright, so to wrap things up, how can we ensure that our resumes are successful? They beat the bots but will still stand out when a human reviews it?

Laurie Ballow (27:32):

So as I’ve said before, it needs to be concise, right? Studies have shown that most folks will make a decision on whether or not a candidate is at least somewhat qualified in six seconds. So you’ve got six seconds to convey that you are a good fit. That means you’ve got to tell your story in the top third or top half of page one and make sure you’ve connected those dots to show that you are what they are looking for. That’s why your title, your summary and your skill section really needs to tie everything in a bow that says, here’s what I do that you’re looking for. Here’s what I’ve done for others and what I will also do for you. So always use the least amount of words, and I learned this in my expository writing class I think as a senior in high school and I still credit that teacher for teaching me how to write in a concise manner.

(28:32):

I avoid run-on sentences, don’t have big long paragraphs. Keep it short and sweet. Don’t go over two pages unless it’s a government resume or a academia. There’s rarely a reason to go more than three pages and nobody’s going to look at the end anyway. Keep in mind that a lot of the folks who are reading this resume might be an HR assistant or an entry level recruiter that’s doing the first pass and they’ve been told to look for X, Y, and Z, so they’re not digging real deep either. They just want to see if you are an executive chef with these skills. So keep that in mind and that’s why simple, you’re not going to have tons of jargon and tons of acronyms and everything jammed up into that top third or top half. You want to make it readable to the average person. Once you get down below that section in your experience, you’re going to have three to five sentences explaining your duties.

(29:29):

What were the duties required of that job? What was the nature of what you were doing? And then save your bullets for achievements, three to five bullets to call out. What did that was? Cool, right? What set you apart from others? What was the result of your work of doing those duties? Here’s what you came up with, here’s how you made a difference. So anytime it’s quantifiable, that’s great because numbers and percentages, dollars numbers really pop off a page and that’s what people want to see because that’s easy to measure that, oh, they made this much difference. I know sometimes it’s hard if you’re in a social service or patient facing role, some of those roles don’t have as many numbers and it’s a little harder to convey. But anytime you can use words like increased, decreased, saved time, saved money spearheaded, if you spearheaded something, if you overhauled something, if you project managed, if you saw a project from concept to completion, if you completed on time and under budget, if you passed your compliance, things like this is what you want to share in your achievements.

(30:44):

Sometimes you have to really go back in the archives to remember what did I do that was special there or what was I recognized for? Think of your performance reviews and what you were told about how you did or what did other teammates tell you you were really good at. What are some of your strengths? This is where you toot your horn. It’s important to toot your horn. Don’t be afraid of it because this is how you’re standing out. This is how you’re getting people’s attention. Now, something we see a lot is that people will use bullets all down the left hand side of the page as an organizational tool, but guess what, when you do that, they don’t mean anything. They just all dilute themselves. So save the power for the bullets to call out your achievements. Don’t get too creative here. One of the things you have to understand about ATSs is they don’t always understand text boxes and graphics and pictures and things that people like to put on here sometimes.

(31:37):

So make sure that you keep it pretty simple because I’ve seen when people use crazy text boxes and stuff, what it looks like on our end, on our A TS, and you can see it might say under skills is education and nothing else under summary might be one, work experience, things like that. So you don’t want that to happen, then you get kicked out, right? So avoid that. Also, you want readability, so you don’t want your font to be under 10.5. You don’t want it to be a crazy unreadable font. Stick with the ones that we know are very readable. People need to be able to scan, make sure you have some white space on the page and appropriate margins. Avoid headers and footers. If you put something important there, A lot of ATSs won’t see what’s in the header footer and no

Lori Cole (32:29):

Pictures

Laurie Ballow (32:30):

And no pictures we’re in the US and we don’t want pictures on resumes. A lot of folks from other countries, that’s a good thing. But here it’s frowned upon. So yeah, don’t do that. Also, it can promote bias. So for that reason, it’s also good to not include it. Avoid lengthy sentences and lengthy paragraphs. Three to five sentences is usually all you should put in a paragraph. And for each of those bullets, usually just one sentence. Also, by the way,

Lori Cole (33:00):

And

Laurie Ballow (33:02):

I already talked about the bullets for everything. So 32nd commercial, that’s what you want. I know the tendency is to tell the whole story. It’s your history, it’s what makes you who you are and why you would be good at this role. But you have to really think, how can I tell this story in a very few words because you’ll have more opportunity once you get in front of somebody. The goal of the resume isn’t to be your autobiography, it’s to get you the interview,

Lori Cole (33:30):

Right? It’s your marketing document, right? Alright, all right. Now I’m going to show you the resume review tool. So once you have your resume all done and you’re like, okay, is this good? Is it not good? What are the applicant tracking systems going to see? We have a tool called our resume review tool that mimics an applicant tracking system. So that will be coming up here. So you can find that along the side of your resumes that you’ve uploaded. It’ll say resume review I, and you can choose which resume you want to review. You can review anything that is in our system or you could upload new resumes for it to look at and this will give you a score. So this is going to mimic the applicant tracking system. We’re going to look at your formatting, your content, what might be there, what might be missing.

(34:39):

We even do an applicant tracking system overview. So we will pull out the skills, maybe skills that would be missing from your resume that are popular for your job title, your tasks, your summary, all of the data. We just take a look at it and make sure it looks good. If you want to talk to a resume analyst, you can always set up an appointment there on that screen or you can go to our resume writing service and we have professional resume writers. They guarantee their results. They a hundred percent satisfaction guarantee. They have written thousands and thousands of resumes and they do such a fantastic job. And if I were in a job search today, I would have my resume professionally written, even though I know all of these things, I think it would take someone else looking at my resume to actually say, these are the things that you should be highlighting. And what’s cool is that they can make you a resume. That can kind of be your base, your template, and then from there you can make changes for all of the individual jobs just to those skills areas and maybe adjust your summaries.

(36:07):

Alright Laurie, let’s recap before we go into our q and a.

Laurie Ballow (36:12):

Okay, so we talked about the right strategy that can get you through the a TS systems. You want to review your job ads and really understand what the keywords are going to be for that job and align your resume with those keywords and your cover letter for that matter. We didn’t really talk about that, but same rules apply. Incorporate these keywords throughout each section of your resume, not just at the top or just in the skills section. Make sure you’re using specific examples. You can’t just say you have the skills, you have to really show ‘em the money and demonstrate those skills and then use AI as a tool to save you lots of time and ensure that you are in alignment with those job ads. And then at the end of the day, your resume needs to be reader friendly, it needs to be short and sweet, it needs to pack a punch and it really needs to be customized for the job. Not that any of us want to hear that, but that’s the reality that we’re living in is you got to customize each time.

Lori Cole (37:10):

Alright, we have so many questions, so let’s get through many of these as we can. If an A TS rejects my resume, how will I know or does it just look like I will never hear back?

Laurie Ballow (37:27):

I’m not quite understanding if it rejects your resume. Did you get the rejection letter?

Lori Cole (37:31):

Yeah. How do you know that it’s rejected your resume? Do you hear

Laurie Ballow (37:36):

Back most the time you’re going to get part of the benefit of having an applicant tracking system isn’t just weeding the resumes out, but it’s candidate communication so it will automatically tell you you’re a match and we want to invite you for an interview or I’m sorry, you’re not a match. So normally with an ATS you’ll hear one way or the other.

Lori Cole (37:59):

Yeah, usually if you’re not a match you get almost an instant,

Laurie Ballow (38:07):

But not always. I know that when I was on the product team, we talked about products that were going to give a thanks but no thanks in a delayed fashion so that it’s not so jarring and people come from different camps because some people are like rip the Band-Aid off, I want to know right now so I don’t waste one more second. And then there’s the sensitive ones that are like, don’t make it look so harsh, let’s give it a few hours. Or I don’t know. I think we give people the option of when they want to send it. I’m not sure how that goes

Lori Cole (38:38):

And this is not in the questions, but it’s just for me to ask. If I get an instant thanks, but no thanks, should I reapply with a different resume? I mean, should I work on my resume and apply again and see if I can make it through?

Laurie Ballow (38:54):

You could try it sometimes if they’ve already blocked you or rejected you by email address or something, it might not get you anywhere, but that certainly wouldn’t hurt because a lot of times somebody will apply for a job because they just want to get it in by a certain date or they just want to show enthusiasm and then they’re like, oh, I’ve made so many improvements on my resume, it’s not going to hurt you. Honestly. We see people apply for jobs more than once a lot of times

Lori Cole (39:19):

Here. So if two people have the same skills, how does the a TS decide who ranks higher error?

Laurie Ballow (39:31):

Well, it’s nuanced, right? So different skills and requirements are weighted differently. So what is the most important thing versus the this would be nice to have, but if they’re not bilingual we can still work with them. We don’t know that, right? As job seekers, we don’t know what the nuances are behind the scenes. So no two individuals are exactly the same, but it’s going to weigh those skills based on what the employer is looking for.

Lori Cole (40:03):

Okay. Do keywords have to match Exactly or will synonyms work

Laurie Ballow (40:11):

Use the same word whenever possible. And the reason is that ATS has come in different levels of sophistication. A lot of times this is based on price or based on when it was released. If somebody has an early model, it might not have the sophistication to understand synonyms. We call these aliases and sometimes they’re trained to know all the other ways somebody might say one thing, a lot of times they’re not. So don’t assume that because you said it this way that the software or the human understands what you meant. Because if they’re scanning for even human eyes, if you’re scanning for a certain thing and you don’t see it, you’re not necessarily doing that translation in your head. So always best to use that. You maybe don’t have to use it a hundred times. I’m not saying you can’t use synonyms in your resume because you absolutely should, but keep in mind what those keywords are that are most important that you want to convey exactly as is.

Lori Cole (41:06):

Alright. Are a TS systems here to stay or do you think hiring will move away from them? They’re not going

Laurie Ballow (41:13):

Anywhere. If anything they’ll become more robotic and more they’ll get more sophisticated. I mean we’ve seen this in our 15 years here, right?

Lori Cole (41:24):

Because we’re in this space. I get all of the AI recruiter and the ai, HR people applications and things that make an HR person’s life easier and they are just incorporating more and more ai. We’re getting to the point where companies can schedule interviews with AI sometimes the first screening call is AI now, so it’s just getting more sophisticated. So be on the lookout for that. How does changing your resume affect the one that you might have posted on LinkedIn in your about section? How would one manage this? Can you repeat it please? So how does changing your resume affect the one that you have posted on LinkedIn in your about section? So I think this person is asking, do you have to change your resume all the time on LinkedIn or do you just manage one kind of generic resume on LinkedIn and then change the resume for each job you’re applying to?

Laurie Ballow (42:36):

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it depends. First of all, on the industry there are some industries that rely heavily on LinkedIn business segments, especially healthcare, not as much. Hospitality, not as much. There’s just certain areas where you’re going to want to pay maybe a little more attention to that and maybe you can marry the two. If you’re looking for more than one type of role, maybe you can marry both of those in there. I know I did write a summary or a profile for someone on LinkedIn where we had to be very strategic about how we presented the two paths because they were very divergent paths. So it was either you’ve got to focus on one or the other, or you’ve got to be really creative about how you bring these two things together that don’t match. And so everybody’s different here and there’s not really one answer. You don’t need to keep changing your LinkedIn profile, but you maybe would want to keep it up for a certain time to focus on a certain type of role or have secondary information in there that suggests that you do these other things.

Lori Cole (43:49):

I hope that how many pages of a resume are recommended for a job seeker with over 20 years of experience?

Laurie Ballow (43:57):

No more than two. No more than two. And don’t go back. Here’s the thing, you never want to go back more than 10 or 15 years. So you will list the jobs that go back to 10 or 15 years. Anything before that you will put in small writing, additional experience. Sometimes we put this in italics and then you list your employer and job title only, no dates, no description, no achievements, you just list other jobs you had enough said, because guess what? Nobody cares what you did 10 or 15 years more than 10 or 15 years ago. They just don’t. Yes, it’s part of your story that you can incorporate into your interview, but it’s just not relevant to today’s world. So you just show that you have that experience. But ageism is real, so that’s another thing. You don’t want to talk too much about the past, the distant past, but that’s a way that it’s going to cut out all kinds of stuff from your resume if you’re cutting back more than 10 or 15 years.

Lori Cole (45:07):

Yeah, good point.

Laurie Ballow (45:09):

I will say one more thing about that. If you have to bring up something, if you’re changing jobs and you have to bring up something that happened 10 years ago or 15 years ago, you can have a career highlight section under your skills before your experience where you could have a bullet that says something great that you achieved during that role. And that’s a way you can bring things up to the top of your resume. And our resume builder gives you that option. You can either do a straight chronological or a hybrid that brings the career highlights up in the front and center.

Lori Cole (45:46):

And if you’re unsure, that’s the time to hire a resume writer. I mean, if you’ve got a ton of experience, I had a career coach gentleman that had Boeing on his resume. He had worked there for a very, very long time, but it was more than 20 years ago. And it took me a long time to convince him to get his resume professionally written so that that experience could still show, but it didn’t actually date the experience and say how long ago it was. So you’re in doubt, professional resume writer, it will be your ticket. Alright, we’re going to do one more here. Will the a TS system scan both the resume and the cover letter for keywords very often? Yes.

Laurie Ballow (46:40):

Assume that it will. So prepare for it too. Maybe some don’t, but you always want to assume that it’s going to and a lot of times you’re submitting maybe as one document or they’re all in one upload, that kind of thing. You just assume that it’s going to and if it doesn’t, fine, but you’re prepared.

Lori Cole (47:00):

Alright, I’m going to give you a bonus one here because I think it’s important, but I want to change this one up a little bit to explain both things. So is the a TS system tool at the actual company where the job is, where you’re applying for the job?

Laurie Ballow (47:22):

Well, it’s software. So it’s something that they’re paying software as a service, a SaaS product where they’re paying monthly fee for this software with different levels of sophistication depending on how big they are and what the actual software is. So yes, most of the time it’s that company’s platform that they are paying for. Other times it’s possible they’re using an agency and an agency is doing the recruiting for them. That does happen as well and they have their own tracking system, but most of the time it is we’ll say, owned and operated by a subscription service that they have that if it’s really sophisticated they might’ve actually built it to meet their own needs because a lot of these are highly customizable. So from that standpoint, usually the employer owns it.

Lori Cole (48:21):

The gist of this question was sometimes when you’re applying, you’re applying directly on the job site. I hire if an employer is posted a job directly on I hire, you are applying at the I hire site. If a company says, Hey, I really want the candidate to come to my website where my a TS lives and apply there, then we facilitate that too. So there’s multiple ways for you to apply for the job, whether it’s straight through going straight through the job board that you’re on, or I know on I hire, we will show, Hey, you’re leaving the iHire site and you’re about to go out to this other company’s website to apply. We give you that heads up so that you’re no longer on the I hire site. So I’m hoping that that answers the question here.

Laurie Ballow (49:20):

Company companies have lots of different marketing platforms that they might choose, so you know who all the big players are, right? They might choose the big ones, they might choose some niche job boards like I hire, they might choose an association or something like that. So we all need more than one solution these days and we try to encourage folks to keep the job seeker on our site because anytime you redirect people are like, yeah, I don’t want to deal with that. And oh and a TS, oh, it is too much data I have to put in. Whereas if we keep them on our site, it’s short and sweet. We know that we’re going to capture that application and then it’ll be a good experience for the job seeker.

Lori Cole (50:02):

Alright, so that was the last question. Thank you everybody who submitted your questions today and took your time out of your day to learn about how to create a resume with ai. We really hope that you learn something and that you’ll go out and you’ll start using the AI tool of your choice to start improving your resume. And hopefully that’s going to get you through those applicant tracking systems. Another huge thank you to Laurie Ballow. Keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow for an on-demand recording of the webinar as well as an invitation to our next webinar that will land in your inbox in a couple of weeks. And in the meantime, check out our resource center for more free advice and tips and guidance on resume writing, plus links to the resume tools that we’ve demoed. They’re always available for you to check out in that resource widget. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks again Lori, everybody, have a wonderful afternoon.

Laurie Ballow (51:05):

Thanks for having me. Alright, bye everybody.

Lori Cole (51:07):

Bye.