Craig: “Craig Ledgerwood here. With applicant tracking systems, it’s been a point of confusion for me. You go to a lot of company websites, they have the text you enter in the work experience boxes. You’ll upload the resume and you’ll try to autopopulate that. Many times you edit that to make it look a little bit prettier, get the content that you want. I’m sure the work experience boxes are searched by the applicant tracking system that the company has. But then when you can also include the resumes as attached documents when you create these profiles with companies and leave it sitting there, do the applicant tracking systems actually search the attached documents as well, or do they only go through those work experience boxes? I’ve never gotten a straight answer from anybody on that.”

Matt: “Yeah, that’s a good question—I actually don’t know. I think it probably goes something like this. I’ve heard stories from some of the HR people and some groups up in Ohio. Shout out to those guys, good friends, good people. They have HR people come in and they have a panel. They do it a couple of times a year, maybe three times a year. Just HR people come in and they talk about how their world view looking at applicants and they talk to the group. But I think what happens is the software is looking at that stuff that gets populated when it parses the resume and it starts, as you say, pretty it up and you make it look good. And then if that information, based on keyword match and other criteria—the right education, the right boxes checked—that gets put at the top of the line where somebody in HR actually looks at it. And then they’re gonna go, “Okay, let me go look at this person’s resume,” and then they would go look at the PDF and actually read it. So, the applicant tracking software, it’s a screening software, it’s a filtering mechanism to serve up candidates, you know. Not wasting HR’s time with people that aren’t qualified or don’t have the right background. So, it’s probably a little bit of both in my background, but Jeff looks like he’s got a lot more experience. I didn’t know there were 300 of such systems, so.

Jeff: I think the top 90% of the companies use one of the top five. But it’s all those little companies that are using something different, and you’re probably got a better chance of getting a job at one of these little small companies than trying to find, you know, working for a big Mega company and then the stockholders say it’s time to lay people off and out you go. So, I don’t know. I always encourage people to don’t forget the small companies that are out there because, great opportunity to do more things at a smaller place.”