THIS WEEK: Is a computer deciding who will see your resume?

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November 14, 2002 >> Receive this email as text  >> About this e-mail   In this Issue >> From the editor: Is a computer deciding who will see your resume? >> Featured topic from SearchSystemsManagment.com: Infrastructure Management >> Reader Feedback: Foo redux plus the $3 computer   Is a computer deciding who will see your resume? by Margaret Rouse, Associate Editor You're applying for a job in IT. You spend days on your resume, agonizing over every little detail. You change your mind about the layout a half dozen times. You worry about whether you should print your resume out on high quality white paper, or be daring and go pastel. No detail is too small to escape your attention. You send your resume out to DreamCompany X and wait. After three weeks, you haven't heard anything back and you begin to worry. You picture your curriculum vitae sitting in a box under someone's desk gathering dust. Worse yet, you imagine your resume going straight in the trash can without being read by a single person in human resources. Don't worry. You're not paranoid. You're probably right. Chances are pretty good that no one in human resources at DreamCompany X is going to read your resume. No one, that is, but a computer. How ironic is that? The first stop at human resources is a computer. A resume, like its more detailed cousin the curriculum vitae, is a marketing tool designed to provide prospective employers with key information about an applicant's skills, work experience, education, and personal strengths. According to U.S. News & World Report, most Fortune 500 companies receive more than 1,000 unsolicited resumes each week. (On a good week, a company like Cisco might get as many as 6,000.) To handle the large volume of resumes they receive, employers like Cisco generally use some kind of electronic applicant tracking system -- Resumix is a popular one. Even mid-sized and small companies can subscribe to one of several independent scanning services to automate resume tracking for their small, or non-existent, human resource departments. Here's how it works: When your resume arrives at DreamCompany X , it gets scanned and saved as an ASCII text file. (If you send your resume by e-mail, it gets saved as a plain text file.) A computer using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software "reads" the text file and stores the information in the company's human resource database. This means that an employer at DreamCompany X doesn't have to spend hours sorting through stacks of resumes to find the right job candidates. Instead, the employer can select potential interview candidates by conducting keyword searches. Resumes with the greatest number of matching keywords or "hits" can be printed out and set aside for future consideration. Before resume scanning and applicant tracking software (ATS) existed, four out of five resumes were thrown out after a quick visual review. Want some good news? Now they all get thrown out. But first, they get read electronically. Since computers read resumes differently than people do, recruiters recommend that job hunters learn how to write a resume that will grab a computer's attention. That means lots and lots of keywords -- the resume writer's challenge will be to figure out what keywords the computer will be looking for. ATS designers predict that as applicants learn to "beat the system" by spamdexing their resume with keywords, it will become even more essential to use fuzzy logic and other AI tools to place words in context and improve the accuracy of the resume sort. This week we want to know: Does your company use applicant tracking software? What do you think of it? Have you ever applied for a job and been tracked electronically? Was the experience positive? Are companies missing something by letting a computer be the applicant's first contact with human resources? Drop us a note or stop by the discussion forum and let us know what you think. LEARN MORE: applicant tracking system http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci858647,00.html electronic resume http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci858924,00.html optical character recognition http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci214132,00.html Fast Guide to Job Hunting and Career Resources http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci550934,00.html Featured Site: SearchSystemsManagment.com FEATURED TOPIC: Infrastructure Management The key to keeping users and computers seamlessly interconnected and information flowing quickly lies in effective infrastructure management. These resources will help you monitor your servers, power demands and performance. http://searchsystemsmanagement.techtarget.com/featuredTopic/0,290042,sid20_gci779262,00.html Performance issues? Sign-up for the monthly SearchSystemsManagement.com Top Expert Advisor Newsletter and learn the tricks of the trade from a team of highly qualified systems management experts. http://searchsystemsmanagement.techtarget.com/registerProfile/1,291003,sid20,00.html  Reader Feedback: Foo redux plus the $3 computer by Lowell Thing, Editor Regarding our definition of "foo," R. Terry McCutchen noted that some World War II military fighter squadrons called themselves "Foo Fighters." David Rouse observed that this is also the name of a popular rock band. Of course, the relationship between "foo" and "FUBAR" will always be confusing so from time to time readers may need to look both of them up. Yesterday, three separate readers pointed out that the last sentence in our Word-of-the-Day, "PDP-11," was wrong. It read: "DEC's first model, PDP-1 sold for $120,000 - about 40,000 times the price of a good computer today, but a bargain at the time." Our readers noticed that with this arithmetic, we were assuming that most computers today sell for about $3. We've changed it to read "40 times." Jonathan C. wrote to say he scored 8/10 on our latest quiz. We're always thrilled when readers take the time to let us know how they did on a quiz. Our latest quiz tests your knowledge about managing computer workstations. foo http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212139,00.html FUBAR http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci748437,00.html PDP-11 http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci862963,00.html   Quiz #34: Workstations http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci862959,00.html This e-mail is brought to you by TechTarget where you can get relevant search results from over 19 industry-specific Web sites.  Whatis.com contacts: Lowell Thing, Site Editor ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Margaret Rouse, Associate Editor ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) To unsubscribe from Updates on new site content: >> Simply Reply to this Email with REMOVE within the Body or Subject -OR- >> Go to: http://WhatIs.techtarget.com/register/1,,sid9,00.html    - Log in to edit your profile.    - Click on the link to Edit email subscriptions.    - Uncheck the box next to the newsletter you wish to unsubscribe from    - When finished, click "Save Changes to My Profile". 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