Tip when applying for jobs on line

[ocnjgirl]

Originally Posted by MPowering1

First, it's not the job description you should be focused on - it's the qualifications.

Secondly, the first person to see the resume would more than likely notice the entire thing was copied and pasted, and that's when most would eliminate the candidate. Besides, it's rare that the skills of the applicant completely match up with the qualifications.

Lift specific phrases from the qualifications and integrate them into your resume, but do not copy and paste the entire thing.

Changing the font on that part to white would effectively make it invisible to all except the computer, how would they notice?

[move4ward]

Try applying to any online job now.

The website will import the resume into a new web intake application for Taleo. Many times you have to rearrange it, because the "hidden" characters show up. When people are searching Taleo or other ATS, it looks at those data fields.

[confounded]

Originally Posted by 3littlebirdies

Good find. Where did you read this?

I wish I could remember! Reddit, maybe.

[move4ward]

When the recruiter searches Taleo, it's not opening up each attachment to search the text(white or black). The data will be parsed or separated into data fields. Imagine an excel spreadsheet with cell representing data item such as name, street address, city, employer, dates of employment.

It will not look like your resume in MS Word or PDF format. The recruiter will see something like the image below.

Notice how the ATS imported the resume incorrectly. The executive summary was misidentified as an item under work history. There is no "white fonting" here, because the original attachment is not being searched or displayed. The system doesn't open up hundreds of Word documents one-by-one to search, and then aggregate the results.

It's searching a database with the data fields, then displaying the data field in the created template. White fonting doesn't come into play.