Resume and Cover Letter Writing
6 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software used by many employers in their recruitment process. This software helps the employer organize and rank candidates so that they can more easily select a few for interviews. This means that having a basic understanding of how an ATS works – and of what an ATS looks for when deciding which resume to mark as “yes, interview” versus “no, not the best candidate” – will help you have a better chance of being selected for an interview.
Applicant Tracking Systems are used when you are asked to apply directly to a company application portal, such as Shopify.
One thing to keep in mind is that an ATS often uses a job description or posting as a guide to finding applicants that match keywords or skills. This is why it’s important to include them in your resume. Some ATS are quite sophisticated, while others are not. Since you likely don’t know what type of ATS your target employer uses, it can be a good idea to organize your resume so that it can successfully pass through the less sophisticated types of ATS, as especially complicated “or over-formatted page layouts with columns, charts or images can be hard for applicant tracking systems to read.” [1]
Here are some best practices to pass through an ATS successfully:
- Avoid headers, footers, and page numbers
- Avoid columns, tables, graphs, and images
- Spell out any acronyms
- Use bullet points instead of paragraphs
- Use keywords from the job posting, if there is one
- Submit documents in MS Word format unless instructed otherwise
You can also save your document in .rtf format to see how it looks in plain text. Go through the document in .rtf format, then check and remove any incorrect symbols that appear in the document. You can then save the corrected document in.docx format. How you save the file will be different depending on your word processor, but we’ve included an example for Microsoft Word that you can follow along with.
