Upload your resume, then re-enter it to apply for this job

Upload your resume and then re-enter everything¶

How accurate is that?

The joke is that applying to a job is an exercise in copy and pasting your resume into the application over and over and over. I've submitted a ton of applications in the past month on my journey for an engineering leadership role (reach out if you are looking for someone). Let's take a look at what I've seen.

I broke this down into 4 major categories:

• No duplication: This type of application either took my resume or LinkedIn profile and didn't require me to fix any fields, re-entry anything, and generally "just worked". From a candidate's perspective, this is the ideal. A little over 10% of my applications fall into this category. A majority of these are using LinkedIn's Easy Apply. The downside I'm seeing, and will report on in a future post, is that the response rate for these types of applications has been very low.
• Minor Re-entry: I classified this is cleaning up or filling in up to three missing fields (but NOT job overviews). The most common thing I had to clean up was dates related to either a job or my degree. Some applicant systems want down to the day granularity, others are month granularity. My resume is to the month. The second most common fields to clean up are my degree and my address. For my degree, I see this on systems that have a predefined set of degrees to choose from. My Masters of Engineering is in Information Assurance from Iowa State University. This isn't a common degree title. My address is listed as city and state on my resume. Several ATSes want a full street address.
• Single Section Duplication: This is a category that either requires me to reenter an entire job or entire educational history. This includes dates of employment, title, and description. There isn't a pattern on what goes missing when the resume is imported. I've had to re-enter jobs and degrees. It's not a single job that goes missing or a single degree. If I start seeing a clear pattern here, I'll dig a little deeper and see how I can clean up my resume.
• Complete re-entry: Here is the trope. One out of five of my applications have required re-entry of more than a single section to the point where I am just reentering everything.

Summary¶

Which ATS is responsible for most of those re-entries? MyWorkDay. Every single application I've put in that utilized this ATS required a full reentry. I've tried multiple resume formats.

Greenhouse seems to be the easiest the use, especially when a company has taken time to embed it into their site with their branding, style sheets, etc.

If a company hasn't embedded the application into their site though, Lever has been better. When LinkedIn integration is set up, applying via LinkedIn and providing a resume has resulted in a very minor edits. The application updates after both steps - approving the Linkedin application and uploading the resume. Between those two, it's been only dates that I've had to change on those applications.

While completely re-entering your resume may not be the majority, fixing things up happens on 9 out of 10 of my applications.

What has your experience been as a candidate? Are you re-entering your resume details this frequently?

I cross posted this over on LinkedIn. Join me over there for the discussion

Andy Wegner - is a father, an engineer and a computer scientist. He is interested in online community building, tinkering with new code and building new applications. He writes about his experiences with each of these.