How your resume is like a sandwich - and why no one is ordering it.

HR managers are searching. But they can't find you.

That carefully worded resume of yours is sliced and diced by the HR department’s Applicant Tracking System(ATS). As a result, many applicants fall by the wayside. 

One company that sells their own version of an ATS did an experiment last year, creating the ‘perfect’ resume(in terms of keyword matches) for an open position. The ATS they tested (Taleo, one of the most common) parsed their 'perfect' resume so poorly that one of the jobs on their resume was listed as a skill, creating a gap in work history! One job location was missed completely.  Several educational components were just… dropped by the system. The result was that the 'perfect' candidate was considered 43% qualified.

Jake Firth wrote an industry whitepaper a few years ago and found that for the particular drop-down box they selected for tracking, 83% of applicants entered the wrong information.

83%! So even if the ATS does a perfect job, your long hours logging information into automated systems means you're likely to make errors. 

I think of it like making a sandwich: 

First, you, the chef, create your  sandwich(“resume”) using the finest ingredients:

• Fresh baked rye
• Black forest ham
• Freshly washed butter lettuce
• Organic heirloom tomatoes

Second, the Applicant Tracking System breaks your sandwich down and notes the following ingredients:

• bread
• meat, ham
• butter
• lettuce
• tomatoes

Unknown terms – the ones you’re most proud of - are discarded or put into other places: black-forest, organic, heirloom. Are we really to that point where you might as well turn in a list of keywords instead of a resume?

Unfortunately, the ATS is in charge of writing the menu, so when the Hiring Manager, who has a hankering for a black forest ham sandwich, searches for exactly that, instead of finding you, they find someone who listed ham ONLY, listed ham first, or they don’t find anything at all and have to resort to a search for ‘honey baked’ ham instead.

Your search for ‘black forest ham’ has yielded 8,369,187 results. 

Even worse, let’s say they DO find you in their ATS and they see that your ham sandwich includes butter. Yuck. Is it fried? They also see your sandwich is 'organic', and that conjures up the wrong image for them. You’re disqualified.

At the very least, your sandwich looks pretty boring, doesn’t it?

So what’s the answer for the job-seeker who has painstakingly written that amazing resume – or even paid upwards of $300 to have their two pages of text perfected? As you can see, the answer isn’t submitting a resume through an ATS. The answer is making a difference, getting noticed. According to every job board I’m reading, the difference-makers for getting hired is almost always one of two things:

• Personal contacts, and
• Standing out professionally.

So rather than wasting your time with another 30 resume submissions into automated systems or online, make a few phone calls to find the hiring manager and send them something different by way of introduction. 

An infographic version of your resume is just one example. You could also try to improve your social presence and contact that person via LinkedIn or Twitter, something different than the (incorrect) spreadsheet program they're slogging through all day. Jim Kukral has a few other thoughts, including Facebook and YouTube. The fact that this is posted on a manufacturing website should tell you that getting creative is something Mr. Kukral is very good at.

It’s never been more important to be different: when an ATS boils your work experience into a handful of words that aren’t even correct, you know you’ve got to try something with a bit more style!

Hey, it's your sandwich, your best work, and you know your customer will love it. Whatever you do, don't rely on some autobot version of your work to represent YOU!

Tony Markey is the Founder and President of nuzume, LLC, creator of the nuzume, a visual, infographic resume..