I answered a TON of questions on this thread - may be helpful to job seekers! www.linkedin.com/posts/amymil_what-do-you-want-to-know-about-the-ats-activity-6693924531985367040-JYXq
Scream it from the mountain tops! HUMANS control the hiring process! This is such a valuable video that I'm going to reference UNTIL THE END OF TIME. My takeaway: The ATS is really like a basic CRM/Project Management tool for job applicants. Do we auto-reject our clients in CRM? NO. When you mentioned that the ATS lists applicants ranked by date, that brought up a semi-related question for me that I get so frequently from job seekers: Is there any benefit to applying early, or late/close to the application deadline date?
haha I'm screaming! ;) Full disclosure - YES - obviously there's all kinds of nuances here but the reality is first applicants get looked at, well, first. The longer a role is posted, the more applicants we may have and there is the likelihood that we've already got a few people in process. That said, we may also be getting stressed out if we HAVEN'T found anyone yet and constantly hitting the "refresh" button in hopes that our dream candidate will still apply. In my experience if a role is still POSTED, there's still a chance. :) But earlier is probably slightly more beneficial.
I followed Amy’s tips on how to identify my dream career (super important & love this video dearly), Amy’s videos also helped me understand how to structure my resume for my desired role and I even learned how to properly reach out to a recruiter. In a nutshell, if you’re a job seeker, do yourself a favor and literally watch EVERY SINGLE VIDEO then apply it!! Guess what? The recruiter called me... THE NEXT DAY.. to learn more about my background, level of interest and salary expectation. Sounds like something you may have learned in a prior week’s AMA video? lol I’m gonna step out on a skinny branch and say the recruiter that I spoke with isn’t a robot 🤷♀️. I’m also happy to report that I’ve been invited to a second phone interview! Thank you Amy for what you do!! I do have a few questions, how many candidates are realistically in each step of the interview process at any given time? For example, should I expect that 10-20 other individuals are in the same stage as I am right now? As an applicant advances from one stage to the next in the process, obviously the candidate pool decreases in number, but by how much? Is there a cap that exists on how many applicants the Hiring Manager and team can consider at once while making sure the applicant has a good experience in the process? Would you as a recruiter prefer to send “batches” of qualified individuals to the HM for review or single individuals to allow them the opportunity to cycle through the process individually? I hope this makes sense, please let me know if I need to clarify. Thank you again! I’m so glad I found your videos, you’ve been so very helpful... and fun to watch 🤗 -Desi
DESI!!! You just made my day. :) thank you SO MUCH for sharing your success!! I am so happy and humbled that I could help even in the smallest way. But it's YOUR expertise and willingness to adapt that got the interview! YES!!!!! To answer your question - (and maybe this is a good topic for a future video) I will usually send several applicants at once. Sometimes I'll even go through them live with my hiring manager so we can discuss each one and what they like or find missing in the profiles (helps me do a better job searching/understanding their hiring need too). That said, we're not talking about hundreds of applications here - it may be 5-10 at a time from which the hiring manager shortlists maybe half of those? That's when you get the call from the recruiter in many cases. There are SO many variables here it's hard to give a specific answer, but the most important thing is YOU GOT THE CALL!! Wishing you all the success in the world! :)
Amy Miller WOW! Thank you for that answer, makes total sense! I love that you and the Hiring Manager calibrate on the ideal applicant! My recruiter gave me feedback after speaking with me and he told me to make my resume LONGER and to be prepared to elaborate on my PM methodologies. I appreciated his feedback and coaching so much! YES!!! I got the call for round 2 *ding ding ding * !! I’m enjoying the conversations and the challenge of the interviewing process. It’s been a while but I’m a sucker for learning new things and over coming hurdles 😉 Take care and stay safe Amy!!
If you ever want a recruiter to throw a big blubbery temper tantrum, bring up ATS. Sort by % match ascending, reject. Sort by % match descending glance at resume for 5 seconds, decide. That way you can say with a straight face "you're not automatically rejected, a person does it!" There's a reason career coaches recommend utilizing your network and talking to people at the working level at the company you applied for. Recruiters are Machiavellian tools.
I wonder what your star is! You can make anyone nervous and if you are my recruiter, I would be hella scared to not to piss you off. Jokes apart but thank you so much for your videos. Your content is unique and amazing and we get to learn a lot from you :)
Love your content! What are your thoughts on tools like Jobscan that do a % match of keywords resume vs. JD? I've had instances where I spend up to 2 hours trying to get 80% match of those "keywords" incorporated into my resume.
Thanks Nicolette - if you can't back up the keywords, they are useless. Meaning that keyword matches are ONE PART of the process - you have to be able to show the CONTEXT of how you fit the role - having "java" on your resume is meaningless - using "java" to ship features and write code 80% of the time for a product or service that is in use by 100K+ users is where it's at (assuming that's what the job description is asking for lol) Hope that helps!
@@AmyMiller Follow-up question: Assuming we include relevant keywords in our resume with full context, is it still worth spending hours fine-tuning them to ensure we get as high a score as possible on ATS-prepping tools like Jobscan? Or does this not really matter? Thanks so much for this video, it helped clarify a lot for me as someone who's currently on the job hunt.
All this information is great! Thank you for sharing it! Question: if I have applied for different roles and attached different resumes depending on the job description, am I going to be in the bucket more than once and with all my resumes?
Don't know if you're using iCIMS, but if so, they do have an Interview Management module that integrates with Outlook, and calendar.ly type ability is supposed to be coming soon. If you subscribe to Recruit, it's no extra money for the Interview Management tool, but you need a good hands-on user admin to configure and implement it, and IT needs to allow it to access the org's Outlook data. Also, with regard to reminders, I just integrated TextRecruit into my iCIMS, and it sends auto texts when candidates pass different statuses. Don't know if it could be configured to fire to the recruiter when a candidate is aging, but maybe?
yeah I shouldn't pick on the tools as much haha but a lot of the fun bells / whistles we just don't get to have - for whatever reason (security concerns, IT approval, whatever)
Very informative video. I had a job application I forgot to withdraw from after I accepted another position with another company. The job had a status of "Under consideration". I just checked today and its status changed to "no longer under consideration" just two days after I changed my status on LinkedIn to not looking. Is that coincidence or part of the process.
So what's with the scoring? Is that just based solely on the qualification questions? Are applicants "ranked" if you do a search of all applicants for specific keywords?
hi! So I can only speak for myself, but I know a lot of other recruiters who operate this way too. This is how I do it - I look at every application that comes in. No seriously. Once I have a shortlist or people actively interviewing I'm not as on top of it as I'd like to be / should be, but I really do look at them all and try to see if they fit other roles too (once I have my shortlist of people interviewing or whatever) I ONLY look at ranking or keyword searches if I'm doing a search - I don't search in individual reqs, I just look at the applications (resumes) that come in, in the order received.
Hey Amy - check out SmartRecruiters... they have a lot of what you'd like to see (self-scheduling, tasks, etc.). Best ATS I've worked with in my 12+ years in recruiting.
Great video as always. Still I am not 100% convinced... Just checked my working table and there was no ATS, but on your table there is one. Could hint that the ATS does the work and you keep him close to your work spot, so he can share the status of different applications... But why would you say that real human do the work, not the ATS? Keep the companies thinking the ATS does nothing and so it is better to pay the recurters? But as long as you keep producing quality content, I will stop spending any more time researching and talking about this topic ;-)
Ok, then here's my question....why does it sometimes takes weeks or months from time of application to getting the rejection notification??? (you know, Sherman hitting the red button) 🦰
I'll have a word with him ;) My guess is (and this is PURELY A GUESS) the recruiter didn't reject after the first pass (or, shame on them, didn't look at your resume) until they shortlisted their candidates and were ready to make an offer. So part of closing the req after they hired someone (or if the role was cancelled) is clearing out the applicants. It shouldn't be this way, but we all know it happens unfortunately.
