A number of days in the past I posted in certainly one of my girls’s Fb teams providing free consultations for resume design. Bear in mind I wasn’t providing something to do with the content material; I’m a designer, not a profession counselor.
The factor about my designs is they’re all ATS pleasant. ATS is applicant monitoring software program and it’s how 98% of corporations weed out candidates. It’s completely essential for job searching to have a resume that may be accurately parsed.
It’s truly the primary advantage of the service; I used to be providing skilled and aesthetically pleasing designs with out dropping ATS readability. There are templates on the web that declare to do the identical factor however typically don’t work as they’re imagined to. I’m additionally very upfront with people who there are different designs from locations like Microsoft and Google docs which might be fairly and purposeful like mine. But when somebody loves my designs, they are often assured my designs will work simply as effectively.
My course of is tremendous intensive simply because I’ve to be 100% positive it parses accurately. The design is completed utilizing InDesign. As soon as it’s finalized, I order it into layers to set the PDF studying order. I additionally tag it with XML to make sure accessibility. After doing this I export into PDF.
Then comes the testing. I am going into Acrobat and ensure the studying order is right. Then I run an accessibility examine. As soon as I’ve verified it really works, I copy/paste all of the content material right into a Phrase doc simply to verify solely textual content and no design parts are carrying over.
This isn’t even near the tip of the method. At this level I check it with precise ATS techniques. I take advantage of a dummy account on Zoho recruit for the primary ATS check. Then I begin pretend purposes with 5 totally different corporations utilizing 5 totally different ATS techniques. If the autofill operate works with all 5 techniques, then I’m comfy being completed with the design.
It’s a painstaking course of and by the tip, I do know the design is 100% parsable.
Then a mob of HR “professionals” got here in and commented saying they know my design gained’t work and replied to everybody that I used to be scamming them.
To begin with, I feel it’s value mentioning that I already didn’t have plenty of respect for recruiters/HR. Most recruiters are very obnoxious and plenty of their job is harassing folks on LinkedIn and posting motivational bullshit. HR departments, past precise work like hiring and firing, spend portion of their time arising with pressured enjoyable and methods to enhance “tradition”. I don’t need a fucking tradition at my job, I simply wish to do my work and go residence. The corporate just isn’t my household and it bothers me to no finish when that’s what HR and administration acts like.
Anyway. I attempted to clarify the technical aspect of issues. I advised them that my designs are completely parsable as a result of it’s the precise doc that comprises the studying construction, NOT the software program. I defined that I’ve examined the whole lot extraordinarily extensively and it really works nice on a number of techniques. They completely ignored me and simply stored mentioning how “fancy” designs don’t work. But when the doc is ready up accurately, they completely do!!
Additionally as an apart, there’s actually nothing fancy about my designs. They’re minimalistic and within the really useful chronological order. There are far more difficult designs you’ll find on fucking Google docs. However the primary fucking fool determined it’s too difficult. EVEN THOUGH IT’S EXACTLY THE KIND OF DESIGN YOU SEE RECOMMENDED BY OTHER HR PROFESSIONALS.
None of them knew jack shit about doc design, however determined they did as a result of they work in HR. It’s like saying UI designers are the identical as frontend devs. Two completely totally different areas of experience which might be loosely associated.
I took the time to compile video footage of a few of my exams. Nope, nonetheless not ok. One dumbass stated it gained’t work on 90% of techniques however couldn’t articulate why. If it really works on the eight totally different techniques I check on, it’s very, very doubtless nothing else may have points. A parsing software program can’t simply magically have points with the formatting as a result of once more, it’s successfully simply textual content. The doc is 100% parsable and that isn’t going to vary between techniques.
I ended up simply deleting the publish as a result of it was so irritating. Not solely had been these folks dense as hell, however they had been telling everyone that I used to be a scammer destroying their livelihoods. After which completely refused to take heed to my clarification of why they didn’t know what they had been speaking about.
This expertise solely strengthened my perception that plenty of HR professionals don’t have anything higher to do than harp on issues, even after being confirmed unsuitable.
It’s unfortunate, but I think you were facing an uphill battle as soon as you said “Facebook group.”
But I agree, in dedicated HR roles especially with whole departments they’re essentially glorified facilitators of paperwork that, it would appear based on their own actions/priorities, don’t have enough work or aren’t prioritizing real issues so there’s just so much fluff, and they often seem to be very passive aggressive or petty if you cross them or otherwise counter to their own benefit. They will easily double-cross you.
Big oooooooof. That sucks! Thanks for sharing tho, very cool to hear about your process for making it pretty AND functional. Your explanation was pretty convincing to me! Also, I think there’s scanners that the layperson can shove their resume in to see ATS results. So if a client is worried about it, tell them they can test it themselves! You don’t want to have to explain everything to every person every time, but since you typed it out so nicely here, now you can copy paste the details of your process to explain to skeptical clients! Though they won’t understand half of it, seeing the vocabulary you use will improve their confidence. Best of luck!
‘facebook group’ + ‘HR professionals’ – was never going to be a happy ending.
dont waste your time.
I’d actually like to look at one of your resumes!
I had no idea about ATS before this so thanks for that!
I feel really dumb for never checking this on my CV before. Do you have templates for sale op?
The Facebook group.. you wouldn’t be referring to LMBDW by any chance?
Dang, I’m studying communications right now and was thinking about trying HR internships just to broaden my experience but it’s always stories like these and the reputation HR holds that always makes me reconsider even trying it out 🙁