Letting a computer decide how good a candidate is

I am quite fussy about the jobs for which I apply.

Over the years I have had possibilities that I have refused as I did not think that my skills were appropriate. In my years in IT I have seen several "colleagues" who claimed knowledge of a certain skill which then turned out to be what was learned on a brief training course and never used in practice.

Apart from presenting yourself as a phoney, a liar and a cheat, you can also look like a complete idiot. In one case I remember that the individual was crashing systems all over the place thanks to his lack of knowledge. Ugh! No thank you!  

So when I do apply for anything, I am serious. There is no intent at deception. If I do not think that I can meet the criteria then I will not apply. Frivolity may occasionally be part of my nature in social situations, but when it comes to my profession I am always serious.

So  yesterday I found a job (with a company called Ariba) advertised in Frankfurt on LinkedIn.com. I read through it two or three times and eventually concluded that  I would be able to do the job well and I had in fact over 90% of what was required. Not a conclusion that I reached immediately - close study eventually brought me to that conclusion, the way the advert was written did not make it immediately apparent.

I spent some time writing what I thought what was a relevant cover letter, picked the English version of my CV in Microsoft Word off the laptop documents, and sent them. I did not change the CV, the theory being that all the information was there and for an IT position it should not need too much restructuring.

A decision to be regretted.

I sent all the details to the company concerned at 1559 CET. At 1602 CET (a maximum of 3 minutes and 59 seconds later, if you work it out)  back came a rejection mail with the explanation that "my skills were not appropriate"!

COMPLETE AND UTTER B***S***!!!!!

And how could anyone reach that conclusion so quickly?

My first assessment was that one of two things had occurred, those being:

Either

they had opened the CV, checked the Date of Birth, and finish. Ageism, pure and simple.

Or

they had sent the wrong message. Applications for the position had been closed, or someone had already been appointed. Somehow they had an automatic responder and the appropriate message had not been generated.

I can accept a position being filled, or the limit on the number of applicants being reached, although the advert should then have been withdrawn.

I was furious though about the insulting reply that I received and the minimal amount of time that it took to get there.

Some clarification on what was involved here came though from a friend in England. He informed me that it is commonplace these days for companies to use an automated system to check CVs called Application Tracking Systems (ATS). Apparently this does a check of certain buzz words and matches them against the vacancy and reaches a series of conclusions about what you have done, what your experience is usw.

Quite how nobody seems certain. That it may be all that accurate I would be liable to question very strongly. The potential for hit and miss is enormous. If you write your CV in the same manner as the way the ATS examines, all well and good.

My CV is written in UK English (no criticisms of Americans is intended here incidentally - it is merely a comment that there is a difference of style where the language is concerned in the two countries). It is literate, written in sentences or succinct phrases. It is built chronologically and the skills used are located alongside the periods spent working.

It is notoriously short on buzz words. To indicate the difference of what ATS wants and what I will offer, quote from one of my discussions on Facebook this morning - "It wants "I was the EDI Systems Integration Lead", not "I was responsible for integrating the company EDI systems" for example .... ".

The end product of this, if this becomes a widespread procedure, is that applying for jobs will get ever harder.

• Every time you apply for a job, you will not be able to use a standard CV any more. You will have to rewrite it using the jargon in the advert and fitting it in appropriately.
• If you normally write in UK English and the job advert appears in US English (or vice versa), you have to work on your communication skills and hope that you can make a good fist of that
• You are going to have to be a lot more careful about what you include and leave out of your application
• You may even need a training course in how ATS works, though from what I can gather it is an obscure art form where close definition of procedures is lacking!

And for the employers who use this, I will be presumptive enough to say that you are throwing away a lot of outstanding talent without even reading what the potentially brilliant owners of that talent (people like myself, but I am not alone) could offer you, merely by using an arbitrary automatic device of unproven quality. 

It is a sad comment upon where we are going. The world is, as my blog title indicates, heading down the sink (rapidly), and this sort of B***S*** is unfortunately helping it on its way.

And as a postscript to the five people who have offered me their sympathies and support this morning - my thanks and appreciation. All of you, rightly, believe that I have a lot of talent to offer. I live in hope that I get a chance to make positive chance to make use of it and earn summat from it before I get thrown entirely to the proverbial wolves!