General Insights To Job Applications Via Machines That Won’t Tell You Anything Behind The Scenes
“…Be Jack of All trades and Master of None.” — A, ex-policewoman, 2003
Before the pandemic started, I worked in a toxic environment where employees came to work like preparing for war. Anyone who worked in the office had in their mind they were entering a war-zone.
At 5pm sharp, 98% of the employees rushed for home. Tons of workload unfinished aside from the daily operational correspondences. We were not encouraged to stay behind beyond our working hours.
My takeaway were the Job Advertisement, Interview arrangement & the Orientation for New Employees. It was the biggest eye-opening new experience. I read multiple of resumes but i did not shortlist anyone at all. The call for shortlisting was up to the respective managers.
Yes, there was a high turnover rate so I often had the chance to practice posting job vacancies in job portals like……Jobstreet! Ta da!
I’m not a Human Resource graduate although I started to find the interest for Training & Development. Welfare and Humanitarian roles kept me going in life. I studied the resumes and saw patterns.
Lesson #1: Does being specialized in a particular industry/field promises us a job faster than those who seemed to be all over the place?
One particular group was people with working history like being in sales, then the next job being a customer service. Subsequently, the person was a purchaser and eventually something else. Another group was people whom specialized in a particular field. For example Banking for 10 years.
It is not whether you are from a specific industry or had been all over the places with multi-roles. How you convinced the employer with your transferable skills is more important in an interview.
Literally, the people in my current field commented about those with multiple roles like me, “maybe they don’t know what they wanted yet”. Interviewers often thought of this group as the job-hoppers.
Dear Bosses, we are in 21st century. Did you not assigned more than a particular task to your Executives & Associates which contradicted their Letter of Appointment and salary? Aren’t we in the Agile generation?
Another comment asked by my cohort was “how do we change our course of direction in work? I had been in aerospace throughout so how do I qualify for a marketing role later on?”
In both instances, whether your are specialized or generalized, these are not the factors that determine your job application success.
Lesson #2: The trigger to qualify for an interview is in our resume!
1- During job application, our resume is important. We need to know that the Application Tracking System or keywords are what determine our resume to be shortlisted. This damn machine took over the job scope of our hiring managers. It often select a resume based on the keywords. The common words are found in the job descriptions.
This explained too, if a company recruited less than a competent person to do the job after allowing computer system and algorithm to shortlist candidates for them.
2 — We may think that our achievements are highlight for potential recruitment. For example, I have awards from the Minister of Parliament in my work history. Are those related to the job role I wanted to apply?
If our award is based on being the New York Best Seller book list, and we are applying for the role of an accountant, how does that achievement benefit to be an accountant?
Our awards are not necessarily the factor that WOW-ed the employers because it either took up space in our resume or ATS machine does not know how to appreciate it for us. Got it? So remove it from our resume or put it right at the back/end.
3 — Our Resume format. Sometimes we got overwhelmed by PDPA mindset that we don’t want anyone to sabotage to our resume. So to have it safely submitted, we uploaded the document in a PDF format. Nobody can alter our resume. The size of the file attachment is smaller too.
Do we know? The job portals read algorithms in .doc format for the ATS to pick up your resume. Save it in Microsoft Office Words. I was told too many graphic designs will automatically reject your resume. So, make it simple and clear.
Remember to save it in Microsoft Word document. Not pdf, jpg, png and so on.
These are the 2 lessons and 3 factors I hope will help. It is tiring to keep changing resume or altering it. I’m going through it myself. I grew tired having to take time adjusting or curating resumes to fit individual job vacancies. Jobs will come with a little bit more of effort.
However, instead spraying 100 of our resumes to applying a job and then being discouraged about not getting a single call for interview, these are the 3 things that we can take note of. I’m not a Human Resource graduate.
These are few tips or for our understanding about our Resume/Cover Letter in applying for jobs. Our educational qualification doesn’t teach us everything. However, do remember that our experiences at work and with people are our ‘teachers’ too.
Let’s stop spraying your resume all over the place, but spend a bit of time, curate it according to every individual job opening which we think suits us.
Pray for me. Praying for you.
