A big number of fresh graduates join the crowded labour market every year, yet getting any meaningful employment opportunity has remained an unattainable to most of those who are qualified.
The inability of many jobseekers to secure employment – at entry level, mid-management level or top-management level – is occasioned by common mistakes made when writing the Curriculum Vitae.
With advanced technology and the advent of online job recruitment hubs, screening of job applications has tightened and only candidates whose resumes are attractive and capture the advertised job opening details proceed to the next stage.
Due to massive applications received daily by recruitment agencies, sorting, filtering and scanning the right candidates within the shortest time possible has become a toll order for employers and online recruitment hubs alike.
To filter through thousands of CVs, both online recruitment agencies and employers have embarked on online Applications Technology Systems (ATS) that can filter CVs within a very short time.
Once the system has trashed your CV for not meeting the requirements you might not get the opportunity because you are already disqualified by the machine.
The system is configured to either highlight or pick the keywords matching the job specifications and description. In instances where the applicant CV does not reflect the main key words, an applicant risk being trashed out before the real human scanning could commence.
So how can you ensure your CVs key words are reflected and detected by the ATS before they reach the human recruiting consultants? Similarly, how can your CV bypass the online applications and land into the recruitment consultant desk?
Hillary Chanzu, a Recruitment Consultant at BrighterMonday Kenya, advises that to make your CV appealing you must tailor it or customize it to conform to the job requirement.
Your CV should have strong keywords as per the job description. Don’t just send a generic CV that doesn’t conform to the job description. Take time to customize it, this way the ATS will capture the key words used and shortlist you to the next stage, he says.
Chanzu notes that the biggest mistake candidates make is to fail to customize their CVs. Recruiters have less than six seconds to scan through your CV hence you should make sure your resume captures the right keywords as per the job description.
The biggest hurdle for the entry-level applicants is how to bypass the machine test and get their CVs onto recruiters’ desk or the prospective employers.
Given the bulk of applications received, Chanzu says time is of the essence and the little time available is used by a recruiter to quickly scan but not to read the entire resume.
“We look exclusively at Keywords that match the job description. This means that unless you make these keywords extremely easy for the recruiter to find within the first six seconds, chances are that you might not be shortlisted,” he says.