It’s no secret that a large majority of CV’s are now written with the use of AI. AI resume writing softwares promise to be ATS friendly and get the attention of recruiters, but if everyone is using these softwares how does one stand out? It can be a confusing time to be a candidate, not knowing if a human or a robot is reading your resume.

At iknowho we pride ourselves on reviewing all applicants to our roles, but that doesn't mean we can’t give a behind the scenes look from a recruiters perspective of how an ATS works, so you can feel empowered to work with or without AI to write your resume’s content and structure during your job search.

To start, we thought we would explain what ATS friendly means. What is happening behind the scenes after you click apply, and how, yes, being ATS friendly is important but how it's equally important in this market to show your unique human experience.

What is an ATS?

Applicant tracking system. It’s like a CRM but for recruitment. Usually built into a recruitment companies’ website and hooked up to their LinkedIn job ads, it’s where all CV’s land after they hit apply. The difference is how they land.

All companies will use Applicant Tracking Systems differently, some will have many more fields active, but the universal purpose is to store relevant candidate information according to specific jobs and then to allow that candidate to be searched for at any point using boolean or key word search.

The reality is that ATS platforms do not read your CV like a human, they parse it. Sadly, an ATS can’t see your beautiful formatting or Canva resume design. An ATS extracts raw text into specific data fields. The truth is, specific to the job you have applied for, if you want to rank at the top of an ATS search there are three key information areas that an ATS will pull from.

1.   Your Most Recent Job Title:

The algorithm heavily weights recency. If a brief calls for a "Senior Product Marketing Manager," the ATS scans your most recent position first. If you’ve used a creative, non-standard title like "Growth Alchemist," you won’t be missed, but it may require more manual searching. Stick to industry-standard terminology relevant to the job title where you can. The ATS will pull more than your recent title, but it will take extra notice of your most recent. So if you took a few months off your Marketing Manager role to be a dog walker, consider removing that from your CV if you aren’t looking for dog walking positions.

2.   Company Tenure & Years in Position:

The ATS automatically pulls your most recent time in role. It extracts the dates (MM/YYYY) next to your roles to map your career velocity. Gaps or overlapping, unstructured dates confuse the parser, lowering your relevance score. Try to keep your employment dates clear and easily understood.

3.   Relevant Technical Experience:

The system scans for exact hard skills and platforms relevant to the role. For example, if the role requires HubSpot lifecycle marketing or Google Analytics 4 mapping, the system looks for those exact phrases. This applies for sector experience such as FMCG, financial services or technology of which may be a particular requirement of the position.

By ensuring you are addressing these three elements relevant to the role you are applying for, the ATS will be able to identify your suitability for the role much more easily.

The Human Element

Outside of those basic elements, having an overly wordy AI written resume can actually dilute the incredible experience you have, or at least make it confusing to read.

Our team at iknowho find that resumes really make an impact when written from the perspective of the person who experienced the role. It's first person human language that really helps us to understand your journey, before we pick up the phone to give you a buzz.

"What we love to hear about from your perspective"

The Team

Who did you report into, what was their job title, how did you work together? Equally as important, who reported into you, what was their job title, what is your management style and what were the benefits of that organisational structure?

Commercial Output and Understanding

Listing achievements is great, but we want to get an idea of your commercial understanding and experience. What was the client’s problem, how did you solve it and what were the learnings? Numbers and statistics are great, if they make a clear point about your commercial understanding, and try to explain your role specifically and in combination with other specific team members, as opposed to the output of the company as a whole.



Values

Career journeys are so individual, unique to every person. Having some evidence of your decisions along the way, so we can understand your personal and professional values, will help us understand more about who you are and where you want to go. Did you align with the organisations culture, their mission or was it the brand you loved?

You might not be right for this role, but we are always thinking laterally about how we can introduce great talent to our networks. We hope this provided some useful information or questions to ponder when you are writing your next CV.

As always reach out to our helpful team at iknowho for marketing and agency recruitment advice.