Last year, Shirin Nilizadeh got a call from a friend who was exhausted looking for a job. Her boyfriend had sent her resume to endless job portals, but it seemed like it disappeared into a black hole. “She went around and asked everyone, ‘What’s the trick?'” Nilizadeh recalls. Nilizadeth had no work advice, but she did have an idea. A computer scientist at the University of Texas at Arlington, Nilizadeh, specializes in security informatics, or how malicious people can penetrate computer systems. Oh my Godshe thought. We have to break in.
Most large companies use software in their recruiting process. Programs called applicant tracking systems can search and score online applications based on how well a candidate appears to be a good fit for the open position. Some, like Oracle’s Taleo, can also rank applicants to give recruiters a short list of people to interview. The resumes at the bottom of the list may end up like Nilizadeh’s friend’s, without ever seeing the light of day.
Nilizadeh devised an experiment to see if she could trick a resume ranking algorithm. She collected 100 resumes from LinkedIn, GitHub, and personal websites and removed a variety of Indeed jobs. She then randomly enhanced some resumes by embedding keywords from the job posting into the text. When she ran those through a resume ranking program, she noticed their rankings improved significantly — a whopping 16 spots. It didn’t matter if the resume listed other relevant qualifications or if it seemed to fit the position.
Nilizadeh’s experiment was purely academic: She published her results last fall, with an audience of security researchers in mind. But as software permeates the hiring process, job seekers have developed their own hacks to increase their chances of applying for a job, such as adding keywords to their resume metadata or including the names of Ivy League colleges in invisible text. One person who applied for an entry-level job at Google told me they listed their Facebook page on their resume because they believed Google’s applicant tracking systems rewarded the mentions of other major tech companies. Some job applicants believe such tactics help: Marco Garcia, a master’s student at the École Polytechnique in France, struggled to get an interview for an internship last year until he started copying the job description of each job on his resume in small formats. white letters. It was invisible to the naked eye, but not to a computer. After adding the job descriptions, he told me he was “definitely getting more interviews.”
Submitting a resume is only part of the hiring process and many hires are still through referrals rather than cold applications. But since so many job openings are formally advertised online, recruiters rely on algorithms to wade through the tidal wave. “You can receive anywhere from 100 to 250 resumes for a single job posting,” said Julie Schweber, a consultant with the Society of Human Resource Managers who spent 18 years in HR. Schweber says software can filter out as many as 75 percent of applicants who don’t meet the job criteria, and help recruiters pick the small number of candidates to move on to the next level.
Software can also put certain candidates at a disadvantage, says Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School. Last fall, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an initiative to investigate the role of artificial intelligence in hiring, citing concerns that new technologies would represent a “high-tech path to discrimination.” Around the same time, Fuller published a report suggesting that applicant-tracking systems routinely exclude candidates with irregularities on their resumes: a job gap, for example, or relevant skills that didn’t quite match the recruiter’s keywords. “If companies focus on making their process hyper-efficient, they can overestimate the technology,” he says.
To help employees get around these algorithmic gatekeepers, another group of companies offers to help job seekers optimize their resumes. Jobscan, one such optimizer, was founded by a disgruntled job seeker who couldn’t get a job interview. For $50 a month, Jobscan provides access to software that mimics an applicant tracking system. It claims to increase candidates’ chances by showing them what recruiters are looking at, including resume scores and keywords. It also suggests specific skills to add and edit resume cliches, such as “team player” or “self-starter.” The company says more than 1 million people have used the software since its launch in 2014.
Other tools, such as ResyMatch and Résunate, help applicants see how well their skills match a job description and indicate how often they should list specific keywords on their resume. Austin Belcak, who created ResyMatch, says this technique works in much the same way as people tried to boost their search rankings in the early 2000s, when they “took some keywords and wrote them on their website.” in the same color as the background.” A visitor to the web page would not notice it, but Google would pick it up and boost the page rank of the website. Techniques have evolved since then, creating a whole field of search engine optimizers. Likewise, Belcak says it’s pretty easy to optimize a resume, but some applicant tracking systems are getting smarter.
