Searching for a job is not always easy, especially when one aspires to an important position in a large company, which will probably lose your resume in an immense sea full of reports from other candidates. This is what Rosa feared, the fictitious name of the protagonist of a story originally told by El Periódico de España.
Knowledgeable of the mechanisms of some companies to select candidates, Rosa chose to try to ‘hack’ them. To do this, she was largely helped by artificial intelligence. And be careful, she did not falsify her resume, but she did add certain elements with which she was sure to pass the companies’ sophisticated filters.
“I sent more than twenty applications and none of them contacted me”
Our protagonist is 34 years old and worked in an important technology company in our country, which is not cited in the original source. After an ERE that would foreseeably affect many other colleagues, Rosa had to find a life.
In his job search he found that he was offered bad salaries, that he did not like the objectives or that the person in charge of conducting the interview was not up to the task. The thing is He couldn’t even get contacted for an interview and it didn’t take him long to find out why.. The reason was none other than the companies’ internal systems for finding candidates.
It is not common in all companies, but it is common in those that are large or that receive dozens of resumes every day. They are called ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) and are basically a software that filters candidates to make sure that only those who a priori fit the company pass the screen. Those who meet the requested patterns become visible to human resources managers and they already assess who to interview. Rosa sensed that her resume had not even reached that point.
Resume SEO exists
If the term “SEO” sounds Chinese to you, in short, it is a series of practices carried out on web pages to be able to position themselves well in search engines like Google. On many occasions it involves using certain keywords, placed in a certain order and with practically hundreds of elements to take into account.
Well, for companies’ ATS there is something similar that Rosa did not know about. These are often filtered by words, skills or experiences. And it’s not that Rosa’s resume didn’t have them, but perhaps it wasn’t as complete as needed.
There is a website accessible to anyone that analyzes how complete or not the resumes are
Thus, he initially resorted to a website capable of analyzing resumes and which you yourself can access. It’s resume.io, although you should keep in mind that it only analyzes documents in English.
As explained on this website, only 2% of ‘summary’ (what they call resumes in English) can pass the first screening in companies’ detection systems. What your tool does is offer advice to improve the document so it can pass the filters. There is no need to deceive, as we said at the beginning, but it is simply a matter of improving the resume with true information, but in a different way than how it was expressed.
What tool can they be improved with? Well, by hand, of course, but today it is no longer even necessary to have tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot. The free version of these chatbots works perfectly, being accessible from iPhone, Mac and any other device with Internet access.
Nevertheless, for better precision The use of more advanced AI tools is recommended. With ChatGPT we can find some GPT dedicated to improving the resume, although it requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month, which is what Rosa pays according to what she must have told El Periódico de España. Thanks to this she has already achieved four job interviews, so it seems that the technique is having an effect.
Cover image | Sora Shimazaki on Pexels