You've spent hours preparing a visually appealing resume that tells a compelling story about your career, professional value and skills. You start to apply for that dream role and are prompted to upload your document into their Applicant Tracking System (ATS). You then watch your content populate into a sea of pre-determined data fields. You start to wonder if all that work was necessary.
A few months ago, I asked hiring managers and HR professionals to respond to a poll and share whether they view candidates' uploaded resumes or their ATS profiles when screening. I've spent a few weeks cleaning up the data (omitting answers from folks who weren't in a hiring manager or HR role). This provided a clear view on employer preferences and tendencies.
What I learned is that the vast majority of HR professionals AND hiring managers open your resume document to make a determination about your candidacy. Only a small minority draw their conclusions from the ATS profile.
Why does this matter?
First, there are many resume "experts" who claim visual aesthetics don't matter in a resume. They recommend that you simply focus on the content because ATS can't process graphics and other design elements. However, if the screener is using your resume (rather than the parsed information) to make their decision, these graphics and design elements can make you stand out from other candidates with bland, text-heavy documents.
Here are a few other reasons to consider your resume's visual appeal:
The average person's attention span is about 8 seconds, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A picture truly is "worth a thousand words" when trying to convey a point quickly.
Our global workforce is now comprised primarily of Gen Z and Millennial talent (59%). This means that a majority of current HR professionals and hiring managers are from these younger generations. We know that these groups are mobile pioneers who grew up in a world of instant global communication. They consider memes, Instagram stories and sound bites as standard practice. They prefer information that is presented in a concise and visual manner.
According to Intelligence Node and several other sources, graphics increase content retention by 42% across generations and 65% of individuals report being visual learners.
Key Takeaways:
HR professionals and Hiring Managers find the formatting of resumes easier to peruse than ATS form fields.
If you ever need to make a decision between visual aesthetics and ATS parsing success, you will likely be ahead to lean on concise writing and related visuals. You can manually enter any information that doesn't parse correctly.
It's important to upload your resume into ATS, rather than just typing application information into fields.
