Technology and job Searching: A blessing or a curse? | Ep. 118
whether you have a job or if you're looking for a new one the use of technology to find your next position can be more complicated than the last time you looked for a job on this episode of today in Tech we're going to chat whether about technology is helping or hurting the job hunt for many [Music] candidates hi everyone welcome to today in Tech I'm Keith jaw joining me on the show today is chewy senator NAA a human resources expert who has assisted with more than 50,000 job placements as CEO of the job helpers welcome to the show chewy thank you so much Keith thanks for having me here today how did I do on your on the pronunciation your last name because I was afraid I was gonna I I I got close I think right you did fantastic you get it you got it man you said it perfectly fine I haven't heard that in a while oh good good yeah cuz you know you try phonetically and it's like no it's not phonetic so uh all right let's just jump jump jump into some of the topics here um you know I I got the impression that finding trying to find a job you know about 20 to 30 years ago it didn't seem as hard as it feels today uh there's been a lot of Technology improvements there's been job sites there's been um you know applying for a job is not just filling out a piece of paper mailing it in or or going into the company and filling out an application uh we now have artificial intelligence that is scanning uh resumés and or being used to write resumés and all those kind of things so talk us through what changes you've seen in in in the uh in the space for companies that are trying to find the right candidates for you know their jobs that they have but also from the job hun Hunter perspective you bet no absolutely so you're absolutely right 20 30 years ago you can just a handshake was was kind of the mandatory thing uh for you to get a job nowadays AI like you said and then data screen in and data scraping and everything that's happening in the in the tech space has kind of influenced hiring directly because what these employers are thinking okay if we were to get a pool of candidates maybe 500 to a thousand people that they can look at fairly quickly and then have their screener software we call it the ATS in Human Resources terms applicant tracking system software programs 93.7% of employers if you do your research you'll see that that many employers medium to large siiz companies are using that kind of Technologies you'll also see that in education you'll also see that the same technology being used kind of in every Dimension industry that you can think of so we're kind of living in more of a tech age and datadriven recruiting is kind of the name of the game for these employers because they're thinking okay if we can look at a lot of candidates and make a decision fairly quickly to interview who they would like to that's a better option for them so that's what we really seeing right now and you started seeing this probably around 2010 you is that the is that a right time frame correct I mean when I yeah when I was at Microsoft a very interesting um dilemma uh that occurred in my brain where um I was talking to a hiring manager and a recruiter at the time this was back in 2013 era and I when I was talking to the recruiter they were like you don't have the keywords and the hiring manager was like yeah this resume is too dense too much um I don't want to read this so then I was thinking okay what am I doing wrong what can I do to correct that yeah so I kind of the the keyword piece really got me to thinking okay what What are keywords what are they doing on the other side that got me to this um research process where I started to think about okay what are keywords and why are they using them and then I soon realized okay they're using a screening platform even at Microsoft at this at the time for you to pass through that system you need to have certain specific algorithmic data points like keywords phrases topics lingo verbiage competencies years of experience and achievements so they can rack up all of that information on their platform and then they're going through these job applications comparing that with the job postings and then all of a sudden now they have a better match for the positions and and and you were telling me before we uh jump on the recording that uh there's a huge jump in the number of companies that are using ATS uh platforms for jobs it went from somewhere like 64% of companies to now 97% I mean that's almost 100% like you know you it would be rare to find a company that's not using an ATS uh what were the reasons for that I mean I can I know I I know the answer but I want I want you to tell me no absolutely Kei that's a great question the reason for that is because everything changed during the pandemic especially the hiring process uh even the companies who were kind of you know brick-and motor or M and pop shops had to kind of evolve themselves super fast to the point where okay we're doing all of this online nowadays even the businesses were going online versus and asking employees to work from home so that Dynamic really brought up this applicant tracking system software to the Forefront for AI systems and screening processes to the Forefront so what really happened was we we went from like you said 64% before the pandemic which is two years ago 20 or three years ago now 2020 to nowadays 93.7% of employers using that same exact system and guess what if you do a quick go Google search yourself you'll see the average time a recruiter or a hiring manager spending on a resum these days is about 7 to 10 seconds which is not a lot of yeah okay so I want to I want to go through uh some of the things that um people probably assume they should do if they're looking for a new job and and I want you know with your experience I need you to say whether people should yes do this no do this or explore something else so uh first one is is pretty easy uh should should they update their resume to fit a specific style or um insert these keywords you know match it to the job description that kind of things or I'm sorry um you know how much of how much how much updating of the resume should they do do they can they still get by with the generic resume for a a lot of different positions or do you need one specific resume for each job that you're applying for there's a lot question yeah I get this question a lot right so um every person I talk to about their resume because we do free resume reviews all day at the job helpers all right that's your first plug that's it no more plugs after that all right all right all right so that free resume review that we offer to anyone right so what we do is we we tell them hey think of it this way okay if you were to if you are a really good salesman what you're not going to do is um you're not going to customize for every every sales pitch for every Prospect right which is really hard to do they might have their own unique situation but then find the needs find the the things that you can address right away and then start to pitch so that's the same process you want to take with the resume writing or resume building process where you want to ask yourself questions like okay find your own scope meaning ask yourself questions like what kind of titles what kind of locations what kind of salary expectations and what industries you want to Target now you're narrowing it down to the point where you you can clearly say okay these are the type of positions you can ballpark it uh two three positions that you can think of that would fit with each other and then think about okay now I need to think about all the key words so that means you want to go through some of these job postings how to say LinkedIn indeed Career Builder zip recruiter major job boards company sites no um you're doing a little bit of leg work yourself but when you're doing it initially you don't have to customize the resume as you go you're doing that up up front maybe take a weekend Saturday or Sunday and then going through drawing up all these job postings and then looking through them and using I mean as a company we would use the ATS applicant tracking system program to get a more of an accurate match of those keywords and then we know okay 15 years of experience is listed 95% of the time by 100 jobs so that means that 15 plus years needs to go on the first sentence because you have 25 years of experience you don't need to list out 25 years because the system cannot read it but it can read 15 plus years that's what we need to add so just like that you're assembling the resume based off of what kind of key terms are getting repeated most of the time so that way you can apply more what about what about simple things like just you know font choices uh uh you know pictures of those types of things like like should I you know it used to be you could you could spruce up a resume um to jump out from all of the Just the boring black and white ones by using different file uh designs formats things like that does that matter or now because you know that it's going to be read by a computer at least initially that you know you you don't necessar have to do that like should you format your resume to fit these ats's you know plain Tex like again if I used comic sands on mine I'd probably get thrown out by a human but you in ATS doesn't care about comic Sands right or or does it so a great question I mean fonts wise think about if you're using Microsoft Word or Google Docs any of these documents word processing fonts are the ones that I would use meaning A ATS system are a little bit lagged per se because a lot of companies are using these systems they're expensive over $100,000 to put in a system like that so they're not updating those systems at least for seven to 10 years so what you want to think about is you want to you don't want to use Graphics or pictures on your resume the reason why is because um those systems cannot read through those pictures it could give an error so for the format itself we were talking about that earlier if you have like a side by-side format where you have your name on the left column and then you have your contact details on the left side you have core competencies listed on the left side and then on the right side you might have your professional experience and the rest of the rest of the work history well the difficulty is the system is reading the left column first and then it might even not move to the right column because it reads from left to right so top to bottom so you want to think about a format choice that would work through the ATS system a good way to identify um um if your resume is ATS compatible what we have seen in the past is go on LinkedIn or excuse me indeed go on indeed upload your resume for a job any job really once you upload the job upload your resume to a specific role uh indeed we'll ask you either to manually upload or add content to um to their platform because the ATS system couldn't read the content listed on the resume or some parts of Miss out of your resume it didn't get copied and pasted correctly that's why you need to add that information about the font font choices you can use Tacoma you could use calibri and then you could use Ariel those are the three fonts that we would recommend at the job helpers and and that's two sorry all right so so so the next question would be in terms of the link uh LinkedIn profile yes update that keep that going like is that the major site where you want to present yourself in addition to your resume uh you know and then the next question would be you know the the job boards um it's definitely yes no or other alternative for LinkedIn yes for LinkedIn absolutely LinkedIn is expensive for employers about $100 per posting per day I think on LinkedIn so absolutely yes because employers wouldn't spend their money if they're not serious okay and then um what about going to other job boards such as glass door indeed zip recruit recruiter are those worth it or is that just if you you know more for the job search rather than the the other tools that they might offer glass door is an important tool because it can show you salary so that's the reason why uh someone or anyone would go to glass door to be completely honest those jobs are maybe posted on LinkedIn as well but glass door is a good place indeed has the most amount of jobs so as far as far as vol volume I believe for you to post a job on indeed is about $38 on average per day that's what they tell you so I mean looking at indeed and Linkedin probably your better choices zip recruiter is good with their marketing platform meaning they'll send you jobs all the time but I've I've heard that okay it's just throwing out jobs for you sometimes even sales jobs for in engineering like first a specialty so that could be the issue there uh okay so um have these these ATS platforms from what you've seen have have they evolved are they starting to add more artificial intelligence or um gen you know generative AI to their processes or they is it still from that 2010 uh era where they're just it's scanning resumés creating then a checklist and ranking for the appropriate keywords you know did H have you seen improvements in in the ATS platforms especially when it comes to machine learning and automation it is definitely improving I mean the three systems that we've seen out there that are predominantly used are going to be workday ADP and isims ADP has been out there for a long time they've been doing payment process I mean payroll and other other things and workday has really it's a newer player um I believe the CEO just sold his company if I don't quote me on it but um so workday is is the newest player in the market and workday has also has its own Erp platform that they're building right now or they have it out there and people I mean like employers are subscribing to it so workday is a new platform workday works works the best according to my knowledge but those platforms will take a little bit it'll have multiple iterations So within the next five years or so we'll see that Predictive Analytics coming into play for sure okay and and you know on on the flip side with uh with a job Seeker should they use generative AI tools you know like chat GPT or or some other uh search engine type thing you know things where they're into a search engine that can also create um tools from from generative AI should they use those to help them write you know a resume or a cover letter or anything like that um does that help or are you seeing more companies utilize uh generative AI to find out if gen geni was used and they might ding you if it can detect that a that a uh you know an AI wrote your You Know cover letter for example yes uh that's a concern and the other concern is privacy because just imagine if you work for a large company they have confidentiality built out or even a small company or medium-size whatever that that company looks like they might have confidentiality set around the fact that okay you cannot share some of that detail if you were to add all of this information copy and paste it to Chad G PT that might be an issue for you personally because chat GPT is open AI so anyone can access it it's like a Sandbox so that's one of those issues that you're going to run into but you can have specific proms on chat GPT that could help you like say for an instance be a resume writer Chad GPT and then build me or give me the best 10 examples out of my career based off of this resume that I've um copied and pasted that's a good way to it or find me the tech jobs or it manager jobs and then bring that up to me or look at this job posting and then give me maybe the key terms or key words um but the difficulty with Chad GPT is Chad gpt's last last iteration came in in 2021 I believe so the a AI the ATS platform is a little lagging I believe I think I think the new one has been updated a little bit I think GPT 4 might be if you if you subscribe to the if you can get in to the uh the GPT Plus at the at the moment uh okay so uh what about companies that might be looking to to scan resumés are you are you seeing that as well or is that just not an issue at this point you mean the the companies that scan res so if I'm if I'm hiring someone and I get a resume do I do I scan it and then say was this written by a human so that could be a real issue because as you know college students do this for the thesis chel yeah so there are systems that are built so I would be careful even if chat GPT wrote your resume maybe I would make some modifications or CH you know change things change layout change format Chad GPT couldn't write you today it cannot write a full resume for you it it can write sentences for you but it definitely can write uh write your cover letters for you for sure all right so so you brought up cover letters is it still necessary to write a cover letter in you know in the 2024 uh World 2023 2024 do you still need I would say yes yeah how I would say yes well the well majority of people will tell you cover letters are inundated the reason why is because if you search on Google only 10% of hiring managers are actually reading through cover letters however we're talking about ATS systems so your entire application gets screened that means if you were to add your resume and cover letter to that application that means it's going to go through the system together so it's another way for you to add more keywords and it'll you'll have more real estate to work with so that's an advantage of having a cover letter today in 2023 and 2024 and another area I would focus on is now say if you were to go into an interview and then they like you but then they like this other candidate as well they cannot make up their mind you have a cover letter chances are you get a effort you get picked for that all right so position it shows an indication that that that the person is more serious about a job than maybe someone who's just making 5,000 resumés and just spitting them out all over the place right praying and praying versus strategically applying yeah and do you are you concerned about some of these automated systems that scan through resumés in in terms of potential bias um I know that that was a big issue with with a lot of these AIS that have come out where you know for example if they have an engineer like an IT engineer position um the system would would spit out fewer like it would it would delete or disqualify female applicants versus mail applicants because of the training set behind it has that issue is that still uh top of mind for everybody or do you think that that the technology has gotten better to eliminate a lot of these biases because it's a law in New York too isn't it like the New York City system can't like the New York City hiring system um you have to prove that your AI isn't biased right yes and that's a that's a great point I don't think the biases are are resolved by any means they're still there a lot of older candidates all often tell me that they're not getting picked by the AI systems because of the word count um that's a real real issue as well um so and also biases are also there um on the technological front um so there's the they could screen it however they like I don't think there is a certain criteria you can select today to weed out female and male um but um that could be a hiring manager thing that they they're doing it on the back endend but the system is not smart enough I I would say to do certainly the okay we without male and female because some names could go both ways as well so that might create some issues and also if they're doing that that'll be kind of illegal right so that's another issue as well but then again the agism is a real issue as well that's also illegal for for employers to not offer you a job because of your age but it happens because now they can create criteria around it where oh do not accept candidates that have more than thousand words or a thousand um word count um that could be an issue well right so you know for an examp for example I think the last time I was looking for a job I had had like uh 25 years of experience at that point starting from like the first job I got out of college and if I if I listed out all of the different jobs I had since you know from that time period you could probably figure out how old I was and so what I did you know so I technically hid a lot of those early jobs um even though it could show uh a broader experience of different different types of companies that I've worked for I just focused on all what number are they putting in the the job posting and then match that to the with my resume it's like okay you want 10 plus years of experience I'll give you 10 plus or if you're looking for 15 I'll give the 15 I would never go beyond the the you know the higher number um is that is that sort of what everyone has to do now or to to fight off the potential agism issue correct correct and and what you could also do is you can create your resume a little bit differently so say some um the summary section that we add to the resume um so you can bring in older experience into into play right away on the summary section talking about personal growth attainment if you have like a older experience that would resonate with the the future opportunities you can bring it in and then or team accomplishments organizational impact type of details you can bring that up um or even core competencies maybe a skill that You' excelled at 50 20 years ago is coming into play you want to add that in or even creating a section called career highlights three to four major accomplishments out of your career before you put your work history and even on the work history section you can segment it to the point where you show 15 years of experience and anything beyond that you can call it additional experience and then show it without the actual dates you could say two years here three years here yeah something like that matter so then the employer has to ask you questions about when did you work and how did you do this I mean all of that that'll be a conversation that you're having with the employer that'll be technically an interview so you can kind of I mean there there'll be body language involved they'll be they'll be seeing you as that point so I think that's a better way to pitch are there um Are there specific uh adjectives or words that people should probably not use if they're worried about um agism or or you know other types of issues you know that might come up in in in the bias part of things like for example if I if I called myself a veteran uh technology journalist does does veteran imply old like you know should I you know I I came up you know this this came up in in in my in my brain when we were trying to explain um uh you know a brand that we were trying to promote there was an older brand that we were trying to promote and I I think I used the word legacy and someone said to me yeah Legacy implies old um so you know should you avoid words to describe yourself that might get that's probably more of a human thing rather than a uh an ATS thing right or correct do they spit out do they reject some rums based on some of the adjectives are you know in a resume not so much yeah not so much because the system what it does is if you look at workday or any of these systems it just copies and pastes so someone in it most likely would copy and paste the job posting to the system and then um you have your application going through it's directly correlating or matching with that to understand what you have so if they have put in certain items on the like requirements qualifications criteria on the um on the job posting it's directly matching to to your resume or your application so so I wouldn't worry too much with the agism factor unless you're doing these things if you're saying something like 40 years or 30 years that's just too much as soon as someone gets to read it they'll be like oh this person has 30 years of experience we don't need that much right need that kind of experience they might be asking for more more money so these pre PR conceived Notions will come into play as soon as they get to open this resume so stay away from saying I mean aging yourself unnecessarily and like you said Legacy right so if you have used some Legacy software like say MS DOS that's something you shouldn't that that's something I wouldn't talk about on a resume nowadays because how many moons ago was it right or or even the older software that the clunky ones that that are not even the company not are not even in business you want to stay away from that kind of verbage or lingo because if it's a technical job they want to know the latest and greatest say python or r or other things that you can BR to the table versus I know C unless you're a Cobalt programmer yeah unless you're a Cobalt programmer in 1998 um and that's when all of th those skills were really in demand because of the whole Y2K issue um you know I guess that then then that would be okay to use uh what are what are the biggest mistakes that people make when they're uh you know put on their resumés or cover letters what what have you seen uh you know some some of these people that or like what would you recommend people not do so couple things right I mean you when you put paragraphs or when you put paragraphs on a resume or even on your cover letter I mean I would personally would not put paragraph on a resume because they just look big block sentences that the employer has to read through or a recruiter they would not read through it they would just skim it through instead have summarized bullet points on the resume all throughout for 35 sentences for two pages if you're adding thousand words or less uh for a cover letter my recommendation is also have some bullet points maybe three to four bullet points right in the middle of the cover letter um and then have maybe two to three sentences that are paragraphs um that you can discuss but keep it clean keep it maybe two to three lines um for every sentence that you're adding in and I wouldn't add more than two to three sentences into a paragraph because they're just not i' I've heard basically three paragraphs for a cover letter like Express what job you're looking for tell tell why you fit and then Express enthusiasm for you know why you want that job or you know excited to exact you know to learn more contact me kind of thing uh okay exactly uh are typos uh a problem or does it not matter with typos yes it is an issue the reason why is because think of these hiring the people who are in hiring or recruiters they get to see resumes all day just like me right I have myself in 10 years I've seen 250,000 rumes so as soon as I get to see a resume I can I can easily check on oh and say you're not doing this correctly or You misspelled this word or something that's because of practice it's the muscle memory that comes into play these people are doing the same thing over and over and over again so majority of the time they are kind of acclimated to the idea of you need to have good grammar that person is more um they're communicating well at the same time attention to detail is there so those things would come into play and then also the third element is tools like grammarly can come into play as well the hiring manager or someone who is hiring you or the recruiter might have grammarly downloaded or they might have a grammarly subscription where they they're trying to email you and then now when they open up your resume Microsoft Word they just saw multiple issues on it that might be an issue as yeah yeah um it you know it it feels like common sense but uh you know my wife has has gotten a lot of rums and she looks at them and she just like shakes her head cuz she sees typos on on these resumes and I was like you know that just shows a lack of effort um there are you know there like you said grammar and spell check and all these other things are out there for uh to correct those types of things all that reminded me of another question I'm going to go off book a little bit here uh as a human resume you know as as a human looking at a resume is there any bias for someone that might use an older email address like if you got someone who had their email was aol.com for example I'm
going to pick on AOL uh if I saw that if I saw uh oh what was the uh there's another one like a Hotmail account like if if my email address was Hotmail Yahoo or Yahoo I'd be like yeah I don't know if I'd really want to hire this person is that a thing or is that or is that just me being you know Tech guet huh or comcast.net I see a lot of they're still in business yeah so gmail.com is our recommended email to use to be completely honest or or something that that is kind of more what people are using nowadays so it just doesn't give give the reviewer the idea of oh this person is different or some of them the the biggest difficulty even more than the the actual email email provider is the fact that some people put in um Joe 1975 at yahoo.com or something like that right so that is an issue right when you put your at like birth date that's a that's a real issue because when you put that I even asked people was this the the date or the year you were born they're like yeah how did you know well your email tells it all right so I picked on it right away so that means the hiring manager is more inclined to do the same thing so you're catching on to certain things like that little bits of things but then those are important things to for your first impression do you see uh uh Generation Z uh resumés that might not even have an email address on them and they're just like oh well just text me or or or do you see like an Instagram handle or or something like that like I I would recommend probably finding at least an email address right if you want to be taken seriously for these jobs correct correct correct it's a I mean social media is social media you do want to add a link to your LinkedIn profile because even though it's social media it's more of the Professional Network so if you click on your LinkedIn profile um link on your resume they should be able to find you on LinkedIn connect with you they might also see Mutual connections uh who are connected to you and also recommendations that you received so and then also your profile who you're connected to otherwise you can see all of those things but then Instagram or other uh social platforms are not set up that way so it's not really recommended for you to add Tik toks or other and unless unless you're yeah was say unless you're applying for like a social media manager position then you can use your hand you know your accounts to show how good you are at something exactly see if you have like you know 200,000 followers on Twitter now you want to share that Twitter handle with them for sure okay um do you think that people should utilize automation or other tools to you know can they still do that without having to technically hire you know a a job coach or a resume service writer or or anything like that do you do you think that there are still you know to get to that other you know past some of these hurdles or do you feel like that the IND and again this might be a little biased because that's the service you're in but you know without going to those Services can can can can people do this on their own yes they can yeah if they want to do it themselves it's going to take a little bit of leg work but you can absolutely do it today um what you want to think about is as I mentioned initially scope build out a scope for yourself ask yourself questions like what kind of titles what kind of locations what kind of salary expectations and what industries you want to Target because that's what we would ask our clients so the the initial uh hurdle for a lot of people is I mean when I talk to them they're like I don't know what I want to do or I'm not really sure if I'm a good fit for this role well find it out to yourself do a little bit of research take a day or two sit down and you know take you know have a cup of coffee while you're doing that Spruce the internet and find jobs because majority of these roles are listed on like say job boards like LinkedIn or indeed and other places so if you were to look at some of these job postings you'll see that there's going to be similarities coming up because these employers there's so many ways that they could ask for certain details and they're going to run out of words to ask for certain details at some point so when you're looking at multiple job postings you're going to see oh cross functional collaboration that came up 35 times so that means that's definitely something that I need to add to my my resume when you're building the resume don't just add content for the sake of adding content or inputting oh this is a key word I better add it well when you're doing that you're kind of going shuffling so much of words and content you the the actual meaning might get morphed um of when you're discussing certain details so so build out a list first is my first um you know first clue of the whole process is figure what they're looking for and then talk about those things on the resume in that order so if you can put it into a priority list base order um saying oh years of experience is number one cross functional team collaboration came up number two they're looking for specific technology like CRM number three and they're asking for you to have people skills number four so just like going through a list of items would help you to assemble the resume correctly so yes it is it is absolutely something you can do and also chat GPD is out there as well so you could use that platform as well for your okay um are you also hearing like another thing I've heard during the job search was that sometimes companies will put up job postings on their site or through indeed or LinkedIn or anything like that but they they they put postings up for positions that they never intend to fill uh whether it's a legal requirement or you know they might have an internal candidate but there's still a rule that says they have to go and look for outside job possibilities is there a way for a job candidate to detect whether the position they might be applying for is a real one or is that still a problem that you just have to you know guess at that point it you know what how do how do how do you address that issue so there are many different things that are behind the scenes that you cannot see right one of them is that we don't know why they're they posted a job like that is it just because they want to fill in a criteria they maybe have someone already list I mean like a friend or a colleague or someone who wants to start that position or maybe boss's friend or boss's relatives who would take up that that position you don't know right so we don't know why that's happening for the time being but either way what you could do is you could do a little bit of research about the company and the standing and then also their standing in in the present Market spa space say look look through reviews that they have had uh look at Glass Door reviews employees are going to talk about these things openly sometimes right so they might come in as unanimous and then talk about or Anonymous and then talk about these these issues online or social media uh spuse LinkedIn as well if they're more likely posting a role on LinkedIn they're probably serious because it's expensive to post those roles you might find on like Z recruiters and that are a little bit cheaper on the on the end so I would even look at okay can I look at indeed and see the same exact posting on LinkedIn more likely it's a real opportunity I would say okay all right uh uh chewy thanks again for for chatting with us on the show today about this a lot of great stuff a lot of great tips uh and uh and hopefully if if people are looking for a job that uh is out there that they'll uh you know utilize some of these tools and services and and tips so thanks for joining us on the show you bet Keith thanks for having me I appreciate it all right uh thanks for watching that's all the time we have for the show today if uh please hit the like button subscribe to the channel uh if you want more videos like this and add any comments you have below join us every week for new episodes of today and Tech I'm Keith Shaw thanks for [Music] watching
2024-01-10 11:09
