Answer this riddle:
I send students into the job market, with high grades, developed skills, they’re the perfect fit.
We build resumes airtight, they put in the work, they’re up for the fight.
Yet every application, whether it’s one through ten, gets them dismissed time and again.
What am I?
… A career advisor leading students into battle against an ATS.
Remarkably, this isn’t a riddle; it’s the reality of the increased complexity in navigating ATS systems and student job search processes, and it’s not just for students.
You feel it, too. You can spend countless hours on resume reviews, crafting the perfect resume for a student, only for them to still struggle with getting interviews.
There’s a reason this happens to your students time and again.
ATS don’t play by the rules. They have their own.
The ATS Rules for the Student Job Search
You probably know about ATS. If you don’t, our friends on the consumer side have some reading for you on what ATS are.
An ATS is software that helps companies streamline their recruitment process by:
- Collecting resumes submitted online for job postings.
- Ranking candidates based on relevant keywords and qualifications (not all ATS do this).
- Filtering out resumes that don’t match the “knockout” job requirements set by the recruiter.
- Tracking each candidate’s progress through the hiring process.
By automating these steps, an ATS helps employers save time and money while ensuring qualified candidates don’t slip through the cracks.
They move fast, too. Our studies have revealed it takes, on average, 10-15 seconds for an ATS to scan and rank a resume.
An ATS invalidates a student’s resume and entire education in 15 seconds.
An ATS takes all the knowledge, experience, and hard work you put into every student who comes through your office and kicks it in the shins in 15 seconds.
They’re the worst.
And over 97% of all Fortune 500 companies use them. So they’re the worst, and they’re everywhere.
This is a big problem for the student job search.
ATS Are Standing In The Way of Higher Ed’s Ability To Show Out
Many higher education institutions are increasingly being judged on how well they place students into jobs.
More and more, students are now asking these questions before picking their school, and so are their parents. Alumni are wondering aloud if they made the right choice.
More questions are being asked at the federal level, too.
Everyone is looking more deeply into the question of the ROI of higher education.
And we know that career services are crucial to the outcome everyone is talking about: employment.
Career services do a phenomenal job of getting students career-ready. The months (and sometimes years) of work that go into each student—developing career competencies, focusing on their skills, and building alignment between their academics and career—all of that can be scanned, sorted, and vetted out by an ATS in 15 seconds.
It takes a toll, too: industry data suggests that over 75% of resumes are rejected by ATS systems before ever reaching a human recruiter. Forbes
If you sent 100 students out on the student job search this semester, that’s 75 who come back empty-handed.
- That’s 75 who won’t get job opportunities.
- That’s 75 students your career services department has to go back to the drawing board with.
- That’s 75 one-hour resume review meetings over the next few weeks.
- That’s 75 students behind them who won’t get the time and attention they need.
For each student who comes back empty-handed, that’s more time they are in your office needing support. The knock-on effect is less time to provide nuanced career support to them and the next student.
ROI hinges on one acronym of three little letters.
Turn the ATS Rules in Your Favor for Student Job Search Success
ATS are devious things. They’re complex because they have to be. If you tried ten times with ten different resumes, you would get different results almost every time. When the ATS changes, the rules change.
This makes for a layered, nuanced problem to contend with.
To beat a layered, nuanced problem like the ATS during the student job search, you need two things: knowledge and tools.
Do You Know the Format for ATS?
The more you know about your enemy, the better prepared you can be to defeat it. Learn how an ATS works, and you can find out how to outsmart it.
It really comes down to formatting. If a resume isn’t formatted correctly, the ATS might not be able to read it. This could make it harder for recruiters to find your application.
Here’s a shortlist of formatting issues that trip up an ATS:
- Using graphics, tables, columns, or photos that an ATS can’t parse.
- Inconsistent or unclear date formats (e.g., “Jan ‘21” or missing months).
- Non-standard section headings like “My Journey” instead of “Work Experience.”
- Uncommon fonts or using multiple fonts.
- Saving your resume in the wrong file format (e.g., .jpg or .png).
Oof! All of those things affect the ATS? You can spend hours going more deeply into each of those issues. That said, you can do the manual research on how to help your students deal with ATS.
Still, keeping up with knowledge and coaching time requirements to contend with ATS is a second job.
You Pick the One Right ATS Tool
Maybe you’re willing to put in the work to stay on top of your ATS knowledge, but those formatting issues can take up quite a bit of time and effort to correct.
Instead, you can choose the right tool to execute the work. There are many choices for that, but a tool built specifically for the job is best.
Here’s a big reason why: there is more than one ATS! Like any software, no two go about their job the same way.
You could use ChatGPT or another AI tool, but they understand an ATS as a stereotype. AI has read the cover of the textbook, the front page insert, and taken a few first-year intro courses on how an ATS works. That’s about as far as they get you.
That doesn’t get you far. To get across the finish line, you need to understand all the rules of the student job search race.
The Power of Jobscan’s Power Edit
What’s this got to do with the ATS?
Everything! Jobscan has a tool called Power Edit—it’s like the home base. The interface provides tailored recommendations and a seamless editing experience to help you create a top-tier resume.
What’s coolest about it as a student job searching tool is a nifty feature called ATS Tips.
This feature looks at your resume and tells you how it will stack up against any ATS. That’s right, any ATS.
The magic is that Jobscan automatically detects the specific ATS (Workday, Greenhouse, UltiPro, Jobvite, etc.) used by the company your student will be applying to. You don’t have to guess yourself! Jobscan has a database of thousands of companies and the ATS platforms they use, so it can detect and then give your students specific recommendations based on their resume and the ATS it will encounter.
For example, if the company uses iCIMS, you’ll receive tailored tips designed specifically for that platform.
The process for using Power Edit’s ATS Tips (and all the other features) is incredibly intuitive. You can teach a student how to use it in less than five minutes, which saves a ton of time.
No more having to stay on top of ATS knowledge
This also makes it far easier to get buy-in from your students. They can objectively see what their resume scores are based on and how to improve them, giving your coaching even more authority.
Your students get that feeling of individualized support and highly relevant advice into their job search that they didn’t have before.
The Benefits of the Right ATS Knowledge with the Right ATS Tools
When your students contend with an ATS using Jobscan, they are going to have a better time with their eligibility for jobs, being seen by a human recruiter, and improving their odds of getting an interview. That’s obviously good for you to provide ROI and show off the good work you are doing!
Along the way, you get to provide students with specific, actionable optimization tips that move beyond generic advice, saving you hours per session on the transactional tasks associated with it.
You get to automate the technical tailoring and free yourself up for more strategic career counseling. Your meetings will become shorter and packed with quality.
You can do whatever you want with this freed-up time and resources! Sonoma State was able to scale its operations and have even more initial meetings with students, getting up to a high of 800 in 2024—a 700% increase since they began using Jobscan.
Because you changed the rules of your fight against the ATS, you can get back to providing tailored advice that reflects an individual’s strengths and goals.
Solve the ATS Riddle to Improve Student Search Success Outcomes
Your career center, and your institution at large, are increasingly being faced with the need to prove outcomes.
More and more, students are picking their future schools based on answers about outcomes:
- Will this school get me a job?
- What internship opportunities are available, and when?
- Will I receive the support I need once I graduate?
In career services, you are uniquely positioned to support your institution. By offering impactful programs and services and working one-on-one with students on transformative career development, you can answer these questions decisively.
The demands to prove ROI aren’t going away, and neither are the ATS that filter out your students from the opportunities they want. As career professionals, you have to keep one step ahead of the ATS to really prove the value of career services to your institution.
Using a tool like Jobscan’s Power Edit can give you a crucial resource to make students feel their time in higher education was not just a good investment but a transformative one.
Unlock Student Success and Reclaim Your Time
Tired of spending valuable time on endless resume reviews, only to have students get rejected by ATS? With our platform, help students get interviews while reclaiming hours in your day.
NOTE:
Data on general ATS use are derived from all historical data from the Jobscan resume scanner, dating back to 2016.
For the data on ATS use by Fortune 500 companies, we reviewed job listing pages for all 500 companies on the list. We were able to detect which ATS was used for 492 of the companies.
For the data on general ATS use, we used data from the ATS Tip feature in the Jobscan resume scanner. That feature allows users to enter the URL of the job they are applying for. Our system will automatically detect which ATS the company uses. The data came from over 1 million scans for 12,820 companies.
