ATS
What Is a Good ATS Score? How to Read the Number
There is no universal ATS score. Here is what a useful one measures, how to read the numbers, and when to stop chasing points.
Burhan USLU
Tracking
Keep Track of 50 Applications Without a Spreadsheet
Somewhere around application fifteen, the spreadsheet starts lying to you. Not dramatically. A row with no date. A status that still says "Applied" three weeks after a rejection you never logged. A job whose posting has been taken down, so the link in column B goes to a
Interview
The Questions You'll Almost Certainly Be Asked for Your Role
Last week we went through how to turn a job description into a list of likely interview questions. That gets you the questions specific to the posting. But there's a second set that turns up no matter what the posting says, because interviewers for your kind of role
Interview
How to Prepare for an Interview Using the Job Description
You've got the interview. The usual next move is to search for "common interview questions", read through fifty of them, and hope the ones you rehearsed come up. Most of them won't. There's a better source, and you've already got
Tailoring
How to Write Resume Bullets That Prove Impact, Not Duties
Read most resumes and you'll see the same pattern. "Responsible for managing the deployment pipeline." "Worked on the customer onboarding flow." "Involved in migrating services to the cloud." Every one of those tells the reader what the job was. None of them
ATS
The 10 Resume Formatting Mistakes That Break ATS Parsing
Most resume advice is about what to say. This post is about something more basic: whether the software reading your resume can find what you said at all. In our post on how ATS systems work, we covered parsing, the step where an applicant tracking system pulls your resume apart
Match Score
What a Match Score Actually Tells You (and What It Doesn't)
You paste in a job description, upload your resume, and a number comes back. 62. Or 81. Or 47. It's tempting to treat that number like a grade. It isn't, quite, and knowing what it measures is what makes it useful. Our first two posts covered
Tailoring
How to Tailor Your Resume to a Job Description (Without Keyword Stuffing)
Sending the same resume to every opening is the most common reason strong candidates get filtered out. Here's what tailoring actually means, what to change, what to leave alone, and how to do a pass in twenty minutes.
ATS
How ATS Systems Actually Work (and How to Stop Losing to Them)
Applicant tracking systems reject more resumes than any hiring manager ever will. Here's what they actually check, the mistakes that trip them up, and how to fix your resume before you hit apply.