Last year, Shirin Nilizadeh received a call from a tired friend looking for work. Her friend sent her resume to countless job portals, just because it seemed to disappear into a black hole. “She went around asking people, ‘What’s the trick?'” Nilizadeh recalls. Nilizadeth didn’t have job advice, but she had an idea. A computer scientist at the University of Texas in Arlington, Nilizadeh specializes in secure computing, or how enemies can compromise computer systems. Oh my Godshe thought. We should break in.
Most large companies use software in their hiring process. Programs known as applicant tracking systems can screen applications online and give a score based on a candidate’s appearance to match open roles. Some, like Oracle’s Taleo, may also rank candidates to give recruiters a short list of people to interview. The resume at the bottom of the list could end up like the one from Nilizadeh’s friend, which never saw the light of day.
Nilizadeh devised an experiment to see if she could fool a background ranking algorithm. She collected 100 resumes from LinkedIn, GitHub, and personal websites, and picked up many job postings from Indeed. Then she randomly improved a few resumes by embedding keywords from the job posting into the text. When she ran those people through a background rating program, she noticed that their rankings improved dramatically — up 16 places. It doesn’t matter if the resume lists other relevant qualifications or whether it’s a good fit for the open role.
Nilizadeh’s experiment was purely academic: She published her results last fall, with a team of security researchers. But as software pervades the hiring process, job seekers have developed their own tricks to increase their chances of an interview, such as adding keywords to their resume’s metadata or including Include the names of Ivy League universities in the hidden text. One person applying for a job at Google told me they listed their Facebook page on their resume because they believed Google’s applicant tracking system rewarded mentions of big tech companies. other. Some applicants believe such tactics help: Marco Garcia, a master’s student at the École Polytechnique in France, struggled to land an interview for an internship last year until he did. Start copying the job description of each job onto your resume in small white type. It is not visible to the naked eye but not the computer. After adding the job descriptions, he told me he “definitely has more interviews.”
Submitting a resume is only one part of the hiring process, and a lot of hiring still happens through referrals, not a job application. But because so many jobs are officially advertised online, recruiters rely on algorithms to wade through the flood. “You can get anywhere from 100 to 250 resumes for a single job,” says Julie Schweber, a consultant at the Association of Human Resource Managers who has worked in HR for 18 years. . Schweber says the software can filter out 75% of candidates who don’t meet the job criteria and can help employers select a small number of candidates to advance to the next level.
Joseph Fuller, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, says the software can also be detrimental to certain applicants. Last fall, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a initiative to consider the role of artificial intelligence in hiring, citing concerns that new technologies have created “a high-tech pathway to discrimination.” At the same time, Fuller published a report suggests that applicant tracking systems regularly exclude candidates with anomalies in their resume: for example, a gap in employment or related skills that don’t quite match the employer’s keywords. recruit. “When companies focus on making their processes efficient, they can overestimate technology,” he says.
To help workers get past these algorithmic gatekeepers, another group of companies offers to help job seekers optimize their resumes. Jobscan, one such optimization tool, was founded by a frustrated job seeker who couldn’t seem to get any interviews. For $50 a month, Jobscan provides access to software that mimics an applicant tracking system. It claims to increase a candidate’s chances by showing them what employers are looking at, including resume scores and keyword matching. It also suggests specific skills for adding and editing resume clichés, such as “team player” or “self-starter.” The company said more than 1 million people have been using its software since it launched in 2014.
Other tools, like ResyMatch and Résunate, help job applicants see how their skills fit the job description and suggest how often they should mention specific keywords on a resume. mine. Austin Belcak, who created ResyMatch, says the technique works similarly to how people were trying to boost their position in search results in the early 2000s, where they would “take a bunch of keywords and write them on their site in background colors.” A visitor to the site won’t notice, but Google will notice it and will increase the site’s page rank. evolved, creating the whole field of search engine optimization.Similarly, Belcak says optimizing resumes is pretty simple, but some candidate tracking systems are getting smarter.
