Resume Matcher – An open source, free tool to improve your resume (opens in new tab)

As for someone looking for a new position, I can give you anecdotal evidence.

A little background: I have 10+ years of professional experience. Polyglot. Experience with extremely small to medium sized companies.

I re-used my previous resume, which did decently well around 2019 when I was looking for a new position, but with updated info for the newest position I had. Applied to a number positions that I was very qualified for -- crickets. This put me in a bad spot mentally, honestly, as it felt like signals that I'm just not "good enough" for fancy "big tech".

I then updated my resume layout to be more parseable (admittedly this is another variable), then signed up for a service that helps ATS-ify my resume. This involved adding numbers to certain line items, reduce repetition, honestly some good feedback in general. Immediate recruiter messages the next day.

I was extremely averse to using a service like this as it just felt "dirty" or was a sign of my personal ethics "giving in" to some sort of system. Honestly, I still kind of feel that way, but this is the game we play now. I know for a fact I've been auto-rejected from a number of roles that I was 100%+ qualified for because of my resume.

ATS optimisation is absolutely critical these days, at least in tech.

With the amount of applications you receive, the easiest first step is looking for a way to exclude someone. If your ATS can't even parse someone's CV properly, that's a great way to exclude it from consideration.

The next level is keyword matching. If your ATS can't find any of the keywords from your listing in the CV, another easy exclusion.

The whole system is completely bs, for both sides, to the point that personal referrals become more and more important. But if you don't play the game, someone else will, and you lose out.

Recruiters that say ATS does not judge are full of crap. Unless you get a referral, or you get manually hand picked from the pile, ATS will decide if someone actually reads your resume. If your resume is a 100% match and you still do not get a call then there are other factors to consider. The organization posting the job is full of full of crap. I have been automating the job searches way before the pandemic. Now, I maybe get a call or two with 100+ job applications. If someone can afford to stay out of a job, I would say watch from the sideline until things cool off. It is not you that is the problem. Anyway, tools such as this can be very helpful vs ATS.

The ATS won't judge a resume, but it will parse it and display in an easier format for the recruiter to browse through.

If your resume does not parse well (for example, a PDF with two columns can sometimes mean the right column text ends up above the left column text) the recruiter will have outdated / wrong information in front of them when they make the decision to do a screening call or not

I know because my cv had two columns for the longest time, and I kept getting recruiters call me "how's it going at <company I left 6 years ago>" and they had my latest cv

> On one side of the coin, it logically makes sense that ATS systems would help recruiters pare down the list. I'd assume there is some auto-rejection happening, but how sensitive is it

When you have 1,000 applications for a job you don't care much about false negatives (having the system reject candidates you might have wanted). Instead you want the software to give you 100, or even 30 resumes to sift through in the hope of phone screening half of them, interviewing only a few, and getting someone who can do the job as quickly as possible.

YMMV, but I started getting more responses when I switched from a LaTeX/PDF CV to a MS Word document with basic formatting (heading styles, bullet points, no tables).

I suspect that quite a few ATS were struggling to parse the PDF.

The automation causes them to miss a number of qualified candidates, but at least one gets through and thisisfine.jpg. These aren't regex strings. They key on keywords and make the stupid mistakes common with keyword filters.

Also, they make the hiring process worse. Know the right keywords to put into a resume and you can be a grand mal idiot, and you'll still get interview time.

I get the other side of it. No HR is staffed to cull through 1000s of resumes, but the systems meant to aid them, are poorly developed and tossed out the door in the name of PROFITS.

Note: Profits aren't a bad thing. PROFITS are, because they ignore everything else for the sake of PROFITS, hence the caps.

A simple example.

How many times would anyone here enjoy uploading a resume, then immediately after, having to either type in the entire fucking thing, or spend 20 mins "correcting" the horrific parsing. If more dev time had been spent the process would be much better for the prospective employee, but they didn't. Companies built half-assed parsing, called it done, and moved on.

Developing these systems into more than just the horse shit out there now would go a long way towards solving both issues.

Source: I've been Senior Technical/Hiring manager for most of my career.

I feel like when I apply for jobs via tech recruiting firms I sidestep this nonsense because I almost always get a resume lined up. It seems obvious to me that ATS is just like whiteboard interviewing, just a tool to trim down on candidates based on silly metrics. In my case I do plenty of web dev, if I am writing any algorithm from scratch I am most likely doing something wrong if its not available to me in some fashion.

A book from nearly 100 years ago recommends hiring a specialist to help you write your job application letter. What I'm seeing here is kinda the same thing except available to people with less money.

It's an unfortunate reality of modern communication and tools.

The incredible ease of modern communication allows businesses to show their offer to many more candidates that previously possible, and allows those many more candidates to respond from a greater distance and with more ease.

However, now there is a new problem - too many offers to sort through. It eats up their time with candidates that don't suit their needs.

So, what do they do? They increase requirements and use automated systems to cull the results as much as possible. They get more and more picky. This is an entirely reasonable answer to the problem.

However, now applicants need to work harder to show they're worth considering and avoid the automatic culling.

It becomes an arm race. Employers have incentive to reduce the incoming applications to keep their workload lower, while applicants obviously want to get the job so must make their application get through.

I don’t see how LLMs aren’t just calculators but for words. It just means that everyone needs to up their game in terms of critical reading skills.

The tragedy of the commons.

We are in the early phases of a recession. The tech-cession is already in full swing. Inflation is through the roof.

There are very few jobs hiring relative to layoffs. Every optimization, no matter how stupid, matters.

Capitalism rewards the razor thin margins, regardless of how filled with puss and scum those margins are.

Hi, the web-app is in development. And the way to use this is Streamlit interactive or the streamlit app. With your Qdrant and Cohere API keys for Semantic similarity.

Unfortunately this doesn't line up with reality. "Tricks" like these are needed to get through the nonsensical recruitment/HR obstacle course for many companies.

> Stop shotgunning your resume to dozens of companies.

Yeah, even with individually crafting the resume and cover letter, my response rate was incredibly low during my most recent job search. After doing that for a while, you realize it's not worth the time/emotional investment.

Hi, my goal is to help people find jobs. Amidst lay-offs and panics, I wanted to create a tool (with whatever knowledge I have) to help people understand whether the Resume Templates they use are friendly. - Are keywords getting highlighted or not?

A scenario I faced was. - I wrote Java in my resume for the role of Java Developer. But there were other words like J2EE, Gradle, Maven, etc. I possess the knowledge, but I didn't write it. - So, I wanted to detect such keywords and develop something that can highlight such keywords.

Conclusion: - I landed three interviews. 1. Big Service Based Company 2. Startups

People like you are rare. It seems like with the ever increasing scale of mechanisation, we are seeing an increasing detachment from everything that makes us human.

Thank you for checking it out! ;)

There's a docker section