How to get a better application score in the age of AI – Part 2
What AI is looking for and how to work it to your advantage.
In this 2-part series, we explain the role AI screening plays for job hunters and recruiters, and how to make sure you don’t fall victim to a flawed system when applying for a role. In Part 1, we covered what AI screening is and isn’t, and who is disadvantaged. In this article, I’ll cover the ways you can increase your chances of getting through AI screening.
As we covered in Part 1, AI models, as opposed to automation, learn from the behaviours of the processes they were pointed at. This means that most AI used in resume screening is simply performing exactly the same job as the recruiter, but faster and without human bias – unless that human bias was introduced during the AI learning phase.
The first thing to do is ensure you are actually a fit for the role you are applying for. If you’re a fresh grad and you apply for a Management Accountant position that requires 10 years’ experience, you are going to be rejected by a recruiter – AI is doing exactly what the recruiter would do. You benefit in no way by applying for the role; and you are actually hurting your personal brand. You are unlikely to even progress to phone screening and you definitely won’t get interview practice. You won’t get feedback on why you were unsuccessful, you will just be rejected because you never had a chance. There is no point applying for roles where you meet none of the requirements, all you were potentially doing in the pre-AI days, was irritating a recruiter, now you’re just providing fodder for the AI machine and setting yourself up for repeated, relentless disappointment.
Then there are the roles where you meet some, but not all the requirements. Maybe you’re a Systems Integrator with the right depth of experience, but you are missing one of the mandatory requirements. Perhaps you know for a fact that the one technical skill you are missing is rare in the job market, and that your experience with a similar product might make you a viable candidate. In this case, you need to pay special attention to your CV. We have a range of articles on CV writing, including Biggest CV Mistakes, Write a resume that gets noticed and Getting past the resume screening.
A critical element is to ensure that your CV is concise, easy to read and contains all relevant information. Then you can look at tweaking it for this particular role. For example, if the one skill you are missing is integrating Monday.com with other systems but you have a lot of experience in Trello and Jira, make sure Trello and Jira are listed as your technical skills, and consider adding “(similar technology to integrate as Monday)” alongside it. This will get Monday on your CV and prevent you from being auto rejected if your CV hits an AI model that has learned to reject applicants that don’t have mandatory skills listed. (Yempo does not do this.) There is no point listing Monday as one of your technical skills if you don’t have it. You risk failing the integrity/truth test and would lead to instant rejection. And it will be uncovered sooner or later – either in the recruitment process, which will irritate the hiring company, or worse – once you’re in the job, which can lead to a probationary exit or disciplinary proceedings. But you can sneak it onto your CV in a perfectly ethical and reasonable way.
Then there are the jobs for which you are perfectly suited. You might be surprised how many people apply for positions without listing the critical skills for the role on their CV. An example is when bookkeepers or accountants don’t list the technologies they’ve used. If you have 10 years of experience with SAP, SAP must appear on your CV, and it should appear a lot. It should be mentioned in every position in which you’ve used that technology, and if you spent 10 years in one role using SAP, mention it frequently, such as “automated transactions and reconciled accounts using SAP”, “managed cash flow and debt using SAP” and “supervised junior accountants in setting budgets in SAP”.
I read an article that suggested listing every technology and skill you can think of at the bottom of your CV, changing the font colour to white so it couldn’t be seen, but would still get through AI screening. This is sneaky and clever but achieves nothing. If you beat the AI screening, the next step in the process will be for a human to review your CV and if you don’t have the skills required for the role, you will be rejected by them. Similarly we see some candidates submit applications repeatedly, changing the data in their CVs to try to get through to the next stage. This is also a dangerous practice; you don’t want your integrity questioned if a company has multiple versions of your CV on file, all with different information. Make sure you submit the right CV the first time. Repeated submissions with different information affect your personal brand and may get you red-flagged as a suspicious candidate.
And finally, we can’t talk about AI screening without considering demographics. Should you include your date of birth, gender, ethnicity on your CV? I’m Australian, and we usually omit these details from our CVs as they aren’t relevant to the hiring process and there are laws preventing discrimination. In the Philippines, most applicants list a full set of bio data on their CV, even including religion, hobbies, home address and a photo. I’d prefer this data not be provided but local norms prevail, and many Philippine companies require it as part of the application process.
Could it be used to screen you out of a role? Could you really miss out on a job because of your age or your gender? Yes you could, but this isn’t because of AI itself. It’s either because an AI model has learnt from the recruitment team that this is what it should do, or the company has made a conscious decision to use automation to follow these ridiculous, unethical and discriminatory rules. Yempo does not do this. If I were an applicant and this is the philosophy of the company, there is no point in trying to trick a system into progressing me to interview or hire – I ultimately will be neither happy nor welcome working in that environment.
So there is no secret to sneaking past AI screening because that secret does not exist. AI is doing what a recruiter would do, and getting past the recruiter is easy if you are qualified, and difficult if you are not, and gaming the system to get to the next stage will likely see you come unstuck anyway.