Tired of Re-Entering Your Info After Uploading a Resume? (Yes!)

Imagine you’re an aspirational job seeker. You’ve spent hours of your days painstakingly tailoring your resume, scouring job boards, linkedIn, Indeed and handful other websites to find the jobs and companies you’d like to apply to. You’ve conducted your research, learned all you can about the role, and have honed your resume according to the requirements of the job description. Then, you click on “Apply Now” and upload your resume. That’s it, right?

Nope. The application page asks you to re-enter your name and contact information. Then re-enter your work history, your education qualifications, every information that’s already present in your resume, along with five other question forms.

There’s another day wasted, repeating every piece of information that was already present in your resume. Which makes you wonder, “Was the resume even necessary in the first place?” Why are companies purposely torturing applicants like this?

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Sick of Re-Entering Your Info After Uploading a Resume? Here's why companies make you do it

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Why are online job applications so time-consuming, frustrating and cumbersome? There’s actually a fair answer to that. Like it or not, online applications are set up in such a manner for the benefit of the applicants. And it all has to do with a piece of software known as the applicant tracking system (ATS).

Certain applicant tracking systems (ATS) possess the capability to automatically parse an applicant’s uploaded resume into a digital profile that can be searched or filtered by recruiters. In the literal sense, parsing means to analyse a sentence into its parts and describe the syntactic roles. In the computational sense, parsing is an act of or the result obtained by parsing a text.

So, if a recruiter seems to solely rely on an ATS to filter the relevant resumes, an unfortunate circumstance of this could be that highly qualified candidates would slip through the cracks. For instance, if a resume isn’t optimised to be ATS-friendly, critical information might not be parsed correctly. That means, when a recruiter runs a keyword search for a skill on a resume, a highly qualified applicant’s resume can get overlooked.

But, what does that have to do with the boxes of information applicant’s are being unwillingly forced to fill out? The answer could be either of the two: Either the ATS is unable to “read” or parse the information in the resume due to its format, or the company is taking all the necessary precautions to ensure that all the information is accurate before they are ready to evaluate the application.

Think of it this way: if a company’s ATS is programmed to receive a resume and then asks for the same information via text input fields, they are avoiding the problems associated with resume parsing. So, the resume that an applicants submit will be used if the recruiter wants to give it a once-over or get it printed for storage. And the information that the applicant manually inputs into the system will be used for the company’s ranking algorithms. This way, an applicant’s resume becomes compatible, and qualified candidates get a higher chance of being selected.

This redundant extra step could be the result of poorly structured recruitment system or the prolonged corporate bureaucracy. A compatible ATS would make online job applications a whole lot easier. Instead of spending hours answering questions to gain information that is already stated in the resume, applicants would only need to make sure that the ATS pulled the correct information and pasted them into the relevant fields.

Until then, applicants would benefit from taking the extra steps of filling out the text fields which would give a serious boost to their applications.

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You need to switch to a better grade of ATS

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The harsh reality, however, is that the lengthier a company’s hiring process is, the more likely they are to lose out on top job candidates, and is a critical waste of time and resources. What can you do about it? Simple. You need to make a switch to a better grade of Applicant Tracking System with AI-based resume parsing capabilities.

AI-powered ATS takes away the frustrations commonly associated with regular resume parsing systems. The bottom line of utilising resume parsers is for their accuracy. Most resume parsers use any of these three technologies - key-word based resume parsers, grammar-based resume parsers, statistical parsers - to provide close to 60% accurate results. But, when compared with the human accuracy of 96%, they lag behind by a huge margin.

Make the switch to better ATS with peopleHum's integrated recruitment management system. Our applicant tracking system with AI-based resume parsing provides the following benefits to shorten the margin of difference between machine accuracy and human accuracy:

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1. Processes a variety of file formats:

‍AI-based resume parsers can handle a variety of file formats, including PDF, DOC, DOCX, and ZIP, allowing candidates to submit their resume in any format.

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2. Analyzes and deciphers complex resumes:

‍Artificial intelligence-based parsers recognises and extracts data from a variety of formats. For instance, tabular templates, picture scanning, and so on.

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3. Better accuracy with machine learning:

‍To extract text from resumes, machine learning methods such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Deep Natural Language Processing (NLP) are used.

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