What actually happens to your resume after you press apply

You have probably read that a robot rejects seventy-five per cent of resumes before a human sees them. It is the most repeated statistic in this industry and it is not true. What actually happens is less dramatic, and knowing it changes what is worth your time.

First, find out where your application is going

This is the part almost no guide tells you, and you can do it in about three seconds. Click Apply on the job ad and look at the address bar. Most Australian employers do not build their own recruitment software, so the URL usually names the system you are applying into.

• job-boards.greenhouse.io or boards.greenhouse.io is Greenhouse
• myworkdayjobs.com is Workday
• jobs.lever.co is Lever
• pageuppeople.com is PageUp, which you will meet often in government, universities and health
• smartrecruiters.com, jobadder.com and taleo.net are the other names worth recognising

Applying through SEEK is a slightly different case: some ads are answered inside SEEK itself, and others hand you off to one of the above. Watch where it takes you when you click through.

We are deliberately not publishing a list of which Australian employer uses which system. Those contracts change, most careers sites will not tell you from the outside, and a confident list that is quietly two years out of date is exactly the kind of thing this guide exists to argue against. Check the ad in front of you instead.

What these systems actually do

Take Greenhouse, which publishes its documentation openly, so you can check this rather than take our word for it.

Recruiters search. Greenhouse gives them keyword filtering over applications, with terms marked as preferred or required, and boolean queries for combining them. A person decides what to search for, reads what comes back, and decides who to progress.

Automatic rejection does exist, and it is worth being precise about what triggers it. It fires on your answers to the application questions rather than on the text of your resume. Do you have the right to work in Australia. Do you hold the licence. Are you willing to relocate. Answer one of those in a way the rule excludes and you are out, immediately, and no amount of resume polish would have changed it.

Which produces the distinction the whole industry blurs: keywords decide whether you are found, not whether you pass. There is no score on your resume waiting to be beaten. There is a search box, and a person on the other side of it.

So why does formatting matter at all

Because before any of that, your document is parsed: pulled apart and turned into fields in a database. Name here, employers there, dates, titles, skills.

When parsing goes wrong, you are not rejected. Something quieter happens, which is that your record is built with the wrong things in the wrong fields, and you stop matching the searches you should have matched. Contact details in a page header can be dropped entirely. A two-column layout can interleave the columns, so your skills land in the middle of a job description. Dates in an unusual format can fail to register as employment at all.

Nobody tells you. There is no error. You simply do not appear in the result set, which from where you are sitting is indistinguishable from being considered and passed over.

That is the honest case for caring about resume formatting, and it is a narrower case than the one usually made. Not because a robot will reject you. Because a person will search, and you want to be in what they find.

Where the seventy-five per cent figure came from

It gets attributed to research it does not come from, repeated by companies selling a fix for it, and it has now been restated so many times that it reads as common knowledge. Vendors describe applicant tracking systems as software for organising and tracking applications, which is what they are: a database and a workflow, not a gatekeeper with an opinion.

The reason the myth matters is that it sends people to the wrong work. If you believe a machine is scoring you, stuffing keywords looks rational, and a resume written for a scoring algorithm reads badly to the human who was always going to be the one deciding.

What this means for what you should actually do

• Answer the application questions carefully. They are the only part that can eliminate you automatically, and people rush them because they feel like paperwork.
• Use the words the ad uses. Not for a score. Because someone will search those words, and if you wrote a synonym you are not in the results.
• Keep the layout simple enough to parse. One column, real headings, nothing load-bearing in a header, footer or text box.
• Then write for a person. Once parsing and searchability are handled, everything else is read by a human, and the achievements you can evidence are what move you forward.

The honest caveat, including about us

Every one of these systems behaves a little differently, several let employers bolt on extra screening tools, and none of them publish everything. What is above is drawn from vendor documentation you can read yourself, and it will not be equally true of every ad you apply to.

That applies to match scores as well, ours included. A match percentage is a useful way to see whether you are speaking the ad’s language before a recruiter searches for it. It is not a number living inside the employer’s system, and anyone implying otherwise, in this category or any other, is selling you something.

You can read exactly how CVShark scores a resume, or check one against a job ad on the home page. Free, no account. If it is silence rather than rejection you are dealing with, the guide on applying for a hundred jobs and hearing nothing covers the other causes.