So I can really only speak to my specific experience although I am connected to a ton of other recruiters on LinkedIn and we comment on a lot of the same posts. Their experience seems to be very much in line with my own.
ATS - what it does is right there in the name, Applicant TRACKING System - is not nearly as sophisticated nor complicated as job coaches and resume writers would lead you to believe. Nor as sophisticated as ATS salespeople would like company management to believe. Just because an ATS can do something, doesn't mean that a company will pay for that particular function and even if the company DOES pay for a function, that doesn't mean the recruiters are going to use it and/or pay attention to it. I know recruiters who work on systems that rank candidates and they completely, totally ignore the ranking because ATS are notoriously bad at that.
It the same reason that services like Jobscan are mostly worthless. I know tons of recruiters who have run their own resume through Jobscan for the job they actually currently have and they get like a 50% score.
The ATS are basically electronic filing cabinets. They are where we can track applicants through different steps in the interview process, shortlist applicants for hiring managers to review, schedule interviews from, send emails from - it's where we generate offer letters from.
There is so much mis/dis information about the job search process in general and the ATS in particular out there. A lot of it is driven by the industry that has sprung up between job coaches and resume writers.
Many use fear as their primary marketing tactic - if you don't buy my course or my resume writing service, you'll never get a job. Which is just 10000% BS. And frustrated jobseekers want someone to blame so I guess telling themselves that "the ATS ate my resume" makes them feel better than their resume was reviewed and rejected by a human.
I, and every recruiter I know and network with, look at every resume that comes in to our open positions. I have had commenters on LI flat out call me a liar and say I could never do that. Well I'm here to tell you that I absolutely do - mostly because it's literally my job. And secondly, why wouldn't I? Do you know how happy I am when people apply to my open positions and I don't have to go out and source them?!
Recruiters are under enormous pressure to get our open requisitions filled. I have two to three meetings every week where I have to report out on where I am in my searches. I JUST filled a position that I inherited that had been open since last May - almost a year. I inherited in January - it was an active search all that time. Does anyone seriously think that I'm not going to look at every resume that comes in?
Granted, I have never in my entire career worked on a requisition that got 3,000 applicants but even if I did, I would still have to go through all of them.
I just had an exchange this week on LI with a guy who said I was lying that I looked at all the resumes that apply to my open positions and insisted that AI was being used to make decisions on candidates. He was laughably bad at trying to prove his point - he posted three articles as citations for proof - none of which said anything of the sort that AI was being used to screen out candidates.
Again, on the 7 or 8 different systems that I have experience with, keywords are just not a thing in the application process.
There's no need for me to search by keywords for new applicants because you're sitting right there in the list of new applicants in each requisition.
I don't know what you do, so I'm not sure what the landscape looks like for the particular positions you're applying for. Some may get a ton of applicants but even then, you're probably not competing against as many people as you might think.
Specifically on LInkedIn. when you see "150 applicants", that does not mean that 150 people have applied to that position. That is the number of people who clicked through the job posting. LI has no way of knowing what someone does when they leave their site. They have no way of knowing who completes an application. The number is typically a small fraction of those that click on the posting. And of those that do apply, approximately 80% will not be a fit. So now you've just gone from competing with 150 people to maybe 20 applied and 80% of them won't be a fit - so 4.
And don't let how long a req has been open deter you either. I just filled that postion that was open since May.
Stuffing your resume with keywords is not going to get anyone a job. One of my recruiter connections on LI that works at Amazon says that is her hiring managers number one complaint - keyword stuffed resumes.
Hiring managers are hiring to fill a need. Are you going to help fix what keeps them up at night? Are you going to help ease their major pain points? If the answer to those questions is yes, can the hiring manager clearly see that from your resume?
Please let me know if you have any questions.
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