Rise of the machines!

Career Connection: Building your professional career

Not all résumés get an initial screening by hiring managers or recruiters. Many human resources (HR) departments at large organizations have been forced to devote increasing resources to employment law, Affordable Care Act implementation and employee benefit packages. Therefore, many HR departments are turning to résumé- and job application-screening software. It's a good idea to know how these Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) work so you can make your résumé more relevant to the job for which you're applying.

Most of these systems incorporate a "bot" (Internet-speak for robot): an automated application that performs simple and repetitive tasks that would be time-consuming, mundane or impossible for humans to perform. Organizations use bots for productive tasks, but, of course, cybercriminals use them for malicious purposes, such as identity theft or to launch denial-of-service attacks. (See Burgeoning bots! part 2.)

HR departments or third-party providers have been using "job bots" — software applications embedded in ATSs — since the late 1990s for screening pools of online applications and résumé submissions. As far back as 2001, some job bots were able to search 300,000 résumés in 10 seconds.

The U.S. federal government uses a system called Resumix to screen online applications and résumés. Resumix and other similar job bots filter these documents through tens or hundreds of thousands of "Knowledge-Skill-Ability" terms (called KSAs) to determine if an application or résumé meets the essential and preferable skills for a particular job vacancy.

The automated application-résumé screening process is designed to reject as many unqualified applications as possible. If you've ever been surprised (or angry) when you received a rejection letter stating that you "did not have the required minimum experience," even though you might have worked in an identical position for years, it's likely you were the victim of a job bot. A job bot in an ATS is programmed to look for specific information (job title, functional skills, years of experience), and if your experience isn't formatted in the expected manner, it doesn't exist as far as the job bot is concerned.

How job bots work

Here's a brief overview of how the job bot software analyzes your résumé:

1. HR receives your résumé (along with hundreds of others).
2. Your résumé is run through a computer program called a parser, which removes styling and formatting (bold typeface, underlining, bullets) and separates text into recognizable strings of characters for additional analysis.
3. The parser assigns meaning and context to résumé content, separating phrases into information types such as contact information, functional skills, experience, education, language skills, etc.
4. The bot searches for keywords from the results collected in step three.
5. The bot scores your résumé on relevancy, which is the semantic matching of employer search terms and your experience.
6. If it makes it this far, human staffers — who might or might not be familiar with your specific, unique knowledge or expertise — might further "filter" your résumé. They're instructed to forward your résumé to a higher-level reviewer who'll determine if he or she should send it to a hiring manager. I don't know about you, but leaving that decision in their hands makes me just a bit nervous.

Structuring your résumé really does require some forethought, the right experience and a distinctive writing style to overcome job-bot barriers. Human eyes might never see your résumé if you haven't optimized it for these ATSs and job-bot risks.

(More) bad news about job bots

According to a March 1, 2012, CIO Magazine article by Meridith Levinson, "Error-prone applicant tracking systems kill 75 percent of job seekers' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their résumés, despite how qualified they may be." (See 5 Insider Secrets for Beating Applicant Tracking Systems.) Peter Cappelli, author of the 2012 book, "Why Good People Can't Get Jobs," writes that job bots are inexpensive but "not very effective in finding the people companies want."

Job bot accuracy depends on the decision rules organizations use in parsing applications and résumés, which in turn depends on the quality and extent of their research to determine appropriate KSAs for a particular function or position.

While the "scrubbing" (cleaning or erasing) of applications and résumés by many ATSs can remove potential bias (age, gender, ethnicity), it's possible that information linked to these factors might not be ignored.

Getting past the job bots

The goal when you apply for a job is to get your résumé past the job-bot gatekeepers and low-level human screeners and into the hands of a hiring manager. Here are some suggestions:

1. Don't just focus on words in the job description. Read it carefully to identify themes, repeated phrases and jargon — keywords aren't always obvious. Without the right keywords (or enough of them), your résumé likely will be rejected. Proper placement and frequency of keywords also is important to maximize their value in the proper hierarchy arrangement of paragraphs. To do this, job applicants should mirror the placement and frequency of keywords and phrases from the job advertisements in their résumés. Usually, the first paragraph in an ad highlights critical, required expertise. Preferred skills, knowledge and experience are listed in subsequent paragraphs.
2. As I consistently tell ACFE members, stay focused on what's important to the person reviewing the résumé or the job bot scanning it. Avoid additional, irrelevant information — any information not directly pertinent to the position, such as coursework or irrelevant certifications — that can distract from the position requirements. It could result in a rejection.
3. Prioritize the words on your résumé. The "Résumé Help" blog recommends that you should audit the job description to build a list of priority and secondary words. Priority résumé keywords are those used in the job title, description headlines or used more than twice. Secondary résumé keywords would be competitor companies or brand-name experience and notable industry qualifications such as special certifications and credentials.
4. Use your LinkedIn network to connect with someone in an industry group forum who can help you find relevant words for a position.
5. Pepper these job-related words throughout your résumé. Use relevant job-related words for all job positions. Order bulleted lists of qualifications in descending order of relevancy to the job description. (This same advice applies to human screeners, such as hiring managers, who might be reading this.) Jot bots might be programmed to search for a certain hierarchy of experience as expressed in bullet lists based on the job ad.
6. Include a table containing relevant generic category expertise, such as finance, accounting, operations, audit, investigation, etc. Specific category expertise would include risk management, financial transactions and fraud schemes, fraud prevention and deterrence, construction fraud, Medicare/Medicaid fraud and data analytics.

One last tip

So, what are the chances your résumé will be evaluated by a job bot? That depends on the size of the organization with the open position, if that organization uses an agency to screen résumés and the position for which you're applying.

Making it past the job-bot gauntlet only gets you to the next step in the hiring process: the job interview. That's it. The skills needed for the job interview, and to ultimately receive the job offer, are what I call the "Likeability Factor." (That will be the subject of my breakout session at the 26th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.)

If you receive an email response immediately after submitting your résumé, then it's likely it's already been rejected. Continue tweaking your résumé and resubmitting until you don't get the immediate response. When that happens, there's a good chance that your résumé made it past the first hurdle and might be in the hands of a human being and not a software "terminator."

The author originally posted this material on his blog, Switch on Your Own Career.

Donn LeVie Jr. has more than 25 years of experience in hiring manager positions for the U.S. Department of Commerce-NOAA, Phillips Petroleum (now Conoco-Phillips), Fisher Controls, Motorola SPS, and Intel Corporation. LeVie is the author of "Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (Second Edition)," and "The Art of the Unfair Advantage: Become the Hiring Manager's Candidate of Choice for ANY Job in ANY Economy" (to be published later this year).

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners assumes sole copyright of any article published on www.Fraud-Magazine.com or ACFE.com. Permission of the publisher is required before an article can be copied or reproduced.