Over the last two decades, submitting job applications electronically has become standard practice in most industries worldwide. There are several good reasons for it, from which job applicants and hiring companies benefit. However, there are also serious drawbacks that can backfire on both sides as well.
On this page, I explain both aspects and what job seekers should do to maximize their success rate.
The Benefits
Submitting a job application electronically is more convenient, faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly for the applicant than sending printouts by post.
At the side of the hiring company, such an application can be easily forwarded to everyone involved, stored and found in databases, processed by application tracking systems (ATS), analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), and later electronically archived if needed.
The drawbacks
However, the ease of submitting job applications this way at practically no cost for the applicants also means that especially larger organizations get constantly flooded with a high number of bad applications from unsuitable applicants. The need to filter those out poses a challenge.
If this is done manually, it requires a significant amount of time of skilled personnel.
If ATS (with or without AI) are used to filter out applications to the extent that the systems can make final decisions in the form of immediate rejections, the companies run the risk of missing out on great candidates who failed to prepare their documents in the right way to get them through to a human.
> The use of flawed ATS and AI
Many job applicants dread the use of AI by hiring companies to evaluate their job applications, but a general fear of AI misses the point. ATS featuring real AI (i.e. smart technology that can analyze texts far beyond the search for certain keywords only) are helpful for both recruiters and applicants.
For example, real AI can recognize that a document is relevant, although the applicant describes their skills in it using other expressions than the recruiter uses for their search. In other words, especially job applications that are not perfect can benefit from being analyzed by AI that deserves its name.
The actual problem is the opposite: the lack of real AI or the use of AI-supported systems that are not set up and / or trained properly, which is still the standard across the world.
For example, job seekers cannot rely on the systems to analyze multi-column CVs / résumés correctly (i.e. reading the columns separately rather than mixing up the words from all columns in the same line).
> Final decisions in 60 seconds
In any case, recruiters now have to constantly deal with a much larger number of job applications than in earlier times. That affects the amount of time spent evaluating each application, especially until the first (human) decision is made in favor of or against it. From my observation, this often happens within 60 seconds only.
The decision is final for all the applications that were not selected for further review. Among the unlucky ones are frequently applications from suitable candidates who failed to present their relevant arguments in an obvious way.
Do the 60 seconds for making the first decision sound unbelievable to you? Here is the gist of a conversation I had with a recruiter of an international maritime company in Hamburg (Germany) a few years ago.
She told me that her company employed 6,000 people in total and received 150 job applications for their vacancies every day that she and her two colleagues had to handle. So, each of the three had to deal with 50 new job applications per day on average. She told me that they were in charge of overseeing the whole recruitment process, which meant that most of the workday was needed for tasks other than making initial decisions.
Consequently, they spent about 45 minutes per day on it, which meant an average share of about 60 seconds per application, just as I mentioned above.
What it means for job seekers to maximize their chances
- 1. You need to prepare your CV / résumé, cover letters, and other application documents for automated electronic evaluation. Read this page on formatting and this article on keywords to learn how to do this.
- 2. You need to present the most convincing arguments in your CV / résumé in a way that the relevant readers perceive them at first glance. Read this page to learn how to do this.