Yes, Stuart. Got an email with the review and an invitation to respond.
Responded. Have a sneaking impression that my emailed response (much as
in the comments cited) was then responded to in part at least, by a bot..
Have since checked to find that all one has to do to get the official ATS
templates (from one site, anyway) is --- you guessed it -- pay money.
Another site seems to offer some free ones.
However, you'd think if (as boldly claimed) agencies are using this
software in an attempt to lessen the workload (understandable) you could
expect to have some indication from them that this is what they do, and
advance notice that strict adherence to their templates is essential to
even getting your name thrown into the hat at the reception's front desk.
Looking more and more like marketing ploy but I guess if agency people are
a bit desperate, they might think this is worthy. But that would make
me worry about driverless cars....
Waiting to see if some free samples offered on another site are going to be
downloadable as promised. Might be interesting to see how good their
Word template design is, given their software's characteristics.
-Peter M.
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On 10 April 2018 at 15:47, Stuart Burnfield <slb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As a way of automating the drudgery of summarizing an applicant's skills
and experience, this software sounds 80% quite clever and 100% useless.
Was there a way to provide your feedback on the report itself, Peter?
--- Stuart
----- Original Message -----
Out of simple interest (at first) I've recently clicked the button on one
site which offered a CV review.
The response indicated that the review depended in part (I suspect almost
entirely) on an analysis provided from the ATS system, and assured me this
is used in most agencies these days.
I was immediately wary -- perhaps with good cause.
Below are some of the results and extracts from my comments on them.
But I should state immediately that there are some other comments on
general style and use of repetitive phrases which I would acknowledge as
being quite useful and a good reminder of a few things to fix.
However, having done a good deal of Perl regex work on documents over the
years, I was stunned to find how dependent the system appears to be on what
appear to be minor variations in layout or style -- that is, presumably
minor variations from some "established" templates.
...
-------
OK is it just me ? Yeah, I'm miffed/narked/p*ssed to find a few decades
of experience skipped over and dismissed.
But does anyone know how widespread this (dumb) software is ?
(Geoffey?)
I can appreciate the handiness of being able to extract summary
information from loads of documents, but I would have thought in these days
of context analysis and ML and all that, there would be a more
sophisticated method being used (Abstract generation/ TLDR ??).
-Peter M
