

I reverse engineered some big job portal systems – here's what I found - dougbooth
http://www.littleroboto.com/index.html#newrules

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dougbooth
Hi I’m an indie software developer based in London and I decided to take apart
job portal software to check expert resume tips (these are the automated
systems/filters people talk about) I think I’m the first to do that.

Five candidate analysis packages cover most of the recruitment market, there
are others out there but these are the big ones. Our resumes interact with one
or more of these at the data centre every time they’re submitted (the packages
are: Sovren, Daxtra, BurningGlass, TextKernel and Trovix - who were bought by
Monster.com a while ago) if you work backwards from the code in these systems,
which is a few months work, you arrive at five very similar looking CV
templates and some high level resume writing rules that they all seem to agree
on. There are some differences between them but to hack the process from the
candidate side you have to take an 80:20 view.

There may be hundreds of different ATS systems out there but one thing they
all tend to outsource is the resume analysis functionality which generally
comes from one of these 5 suppliers.

The rules supplied were found, through a variety of methods: decompiling code,
live testing with dummy data, dummy recruiter accounts on job portals -
whatever I could do to check what was happening to the data.

Wondered if any of you guys had anything to add? if you think it’s a good idea
going forward or had any feedback?

[There's a free sample resume on my site if you want to take a look - it's
less exotic than you'd expect]

~~~
PaulHoule
The dependence on capitalization interests me because I've found that when you
scan paperwork, you can get pretty far in terms of recall (say 94%) by
insisting on perfect capitalization, and you only get to 97% when you relax
this cconstraint.

I would say overall though, there is a huge focus on "hiring as a problem" and
"getting hired as a problem" and not very much on "what do you do with these
people once you've hired them." And I think the latter is the thing that
really matters because you won't (1) get the results you are paying for or (2)
retain people if you don't fix it.

