If you were a recruiter and you came across a resume with a “keyword” section, repeated and juxtaposed with no real meaning. How would you feel? Perhaps, the next applicant’s resume had keywords highlighted, or the entire job description you sent out is reproduced on the resume, how would that make you feel?
Let’s take another instance. You have just posted an opening for a sales executive. Then you find an application in your mail with a resume that has “sales sales sales” written at the top. What would you do? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll put it aside and move on to the next one. The truth is, if you do a thing like that, the recruiter sees you as someone who’d always want to cheat their way through. Nobody wants that. Besides, that is not the attitude of a qualified candidate and absolutely not appreciated by most Canadian organizations and employers.
Are you really trying to trick an Applicant Tracking System?
The craze in the labour world for many years now is the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and how to beat it. Many career coaches have given several pieces of advice on how a candidate can tweak a resume to get past the system. But if you don’t do it right, you’ll miss out. If you simply cram your resume with keywords, you might beat the ATS for your resume and job posting matching score. However, you will simply break peace with the recruiter. A Canadian recruiter would want to see the soft skills in your resume with a right balance of the hard skills. The rule is; do not try to trick the ATS – more specifically a Canadian ATS.
As a Canadian job seeker, you should optimize your resume by using a Canadian Applicant Tracking System (CATS). This system will help you identify the right keywords in a job description. And after you must’ve included them, the CATS will also tell you if you’ve done a good job. Don’t try to manually pick out the keywords; you’ll seldom get it right. Instead, use a Canadian Applicant Tracking System to help you pick out keywords that are important to the Canadian employer and show you how to use them.
One way to beat the bots and impress the employer is to include a keyword rich resume summary based on results from the CATS. This will include everything from your experience and skill to your intent. But you must speak to them and not just list them out.
