Latest / Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search / What 1.7 Million Job Applications Reveal About Resumes: The ATS Myth, One-Page Rule, Keywords, and Tailoring Debunked with Sam Wright, Huntr

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What 1.7 Million Job Applications Reveal About Resumes: The ATS Myth, One-Page Rule, Keywords, and Tailoring Debunked with Sam Wright, Huntr · Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search

• 0:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: You probably know all the resume rules. The question is, which ones are actually true? Turns out a lot of the rules that we've been following on our job search, one page only, match every keyword, don't trigger the ATS bot, well, they aren't rules at all. They're just guesses that everyone kept repeating.
• 0:17
  Most job search advice was never tested. It was passed down. Someone decided it once, probably for a reason that made sense at the time, or didn't, and once enough people repeated it with confidence, it started to feel like fact. Sam Wright has analyzed over a million resumes and 1.7 million applications at Huntr to find out which of these rules actually hold up. Turns out some do, but most don't, and what he found is going to change how you think about your resume, your tailoring, and, quite frankly, your entire job search.
• 0:47
  This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.
• 1:12
  8 out of 10 job seekers believe AI is silently rejecting their resume before a human ever looks at it, and this is just one example of myths about resumes and applications that Sam Wright and Huntr's data says is mostly wrong.
• 1:29
  And by the way, the real reason you're being ignored has almost nothing to do with a robot or AI. The numbers that you're gonna hear from Sam that he shares in this episode aren't based on a handful of stories or a gut feeling about what should work. He's actually pulling from over 1.7 million data points in the form of applications and over a million job postings, and more than 240,000 resumes that are tracked through Huntr.
• 1:54
  Now, that's the kind of sample size that turns a hunch into a pattern, and a pattern into something you can actually build a strategy around. In this episode, we're gonna cover what specifically makes tailoring applications and resumes work, and why so many people who think they're already doing a good job are still not getting results.
• 2:12
  We're gonna cover why referrals move the needle more than almost anything else in the process, and what's really happening when you feel like you've been ghosted after an interview. Plus, why someone who lands an offer within their first 10 applications and someone who's still grinding on their application number 150, well, those two people are not running the same job search at all.
• 2:31
  And by the way, one really important note here. We're gonna deep dive into application and resume myths on this particular episode, but if the problem that you really have is more about career transition, career pivots, or choosing how to make an effective career change, then I'd suggest our career change guide instead.
• 2:47
  And we've actually added a link where you can get that guide for free. It's in the show notes, and it walks you through how to find work that's the right fit. Speaking of which, here's Sam talking about his career change journey that led him to Huntr in the first place.
• 2:59
  Just to kinda kick us off, you didn't start at Huntr at all; you started elsewhere with your career. So I'm curious, where did you start and how did you find your way over to working with Huntr and, you know, taking on the roles that you have there? Let's go back for a minute, Sam.
• 3:16
  Sam Wright: I guess it started college, University of Washington. I just tried to graduate in anything and everything, so I did political economics, I did sales, I did almost a minor in computer science, I did entrepreneurship.
• 3:27
  So a bunch of different things. And during that time, I found tech sales to kind of be the thing that I was most passionate about and interested in, so had some internships in that space. Then took a detour and joined the Peace Corps after college, and was a teacher, a community economic development advisor, and youth entrepreneurship educator.
• 3:46
  So, teaching kids how to build businesses and create business plans in high school. And I learned that that was the hardest sales job you could have is teaching kids, you know, early in the morning, you know, or even after-school programs, like, to get them to pay attention. It was one of the hardest sales jobs I'd ever had.
• 4:02
  And, yeah, I took a few different routes. I was a political organizer, a community organizer for a little while. I then also got back into tech sales, and that was kind of my main thing. And joined Huntr early on, so we're a team of… right now we're just a team of three. And we got started about seven years ago by the founder, Rennie, who was just trying to get his own job in tech, and he was applying to lots of jobs.
• 4:27
  He realized he didn't have a place to kind of keep organized and keep track of everything. So he built Huntr, a Kanban Trello-style board to track his job search, and then, like, schools and boot camps and code academies were really interested in that. So he started to sell to them a service to keep track of everybody's job searches, and so work with many job seekers all at once in this kind of collaborative job search environment.
• 4:51
  And that's when I came on as, like, an account executive in the space, just kind of selling, you know, B2B software to these code academies and boot camps. And yeah, fast-forward a few years, I just started to realize how much great data that we have in the space, and how, like, that's really valuable to a lot of folks.
• 5:09
  There's a lot of advice out there that's just kind of hearsay, and everybody and their uncle has an opinion on how you should job search. So just wanted to share, like, data-backed job search best practices from a company that's kind of unique because we have that tracker, and we also have resumes, so we can kind of see what resumes get interviews and what don't, and what are some of the trends and insights that we can gather from that.
• 5:32
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Yeah, definitely excited to dig more into some of those specific areas. I am curious, though, what prompted you to join the Peace Corps? My mom almost joined the Peace Corps, and we almost were moved as children. We were, like, that close. But I am really curious.
• 5:49
  Sam Wright: Yeah. I had an uncle that was in the Peace Corps back in the '70s, like, one of the first groups to go over, and then a great-aunt on the other side that was also in the Peace Corps back then. One went to Malaysia, one went to the Dominican Republic.
• 6:02
  They were kind of, like, the coolest people growing up that had the most interesting stories, and I think I was just like, "I wanna be somebody who has some interesting stories, too." So yeah, I think it was partly that. It was partly being 21, 22, and just not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, where I wanted to go.
• 6:21
  Thought that it was an opportunity to maybe give back in some way. Yeah, I think that those were kind of the main reasons is to learn, to have an adventure, to try and be helpful in some way in this world.
• 6:32
  Scott Anthony Barlow: But I think the real question is, did you get your stories?
• 6:35
  Sam Wright: There are a lot of good stories and, yeah, I was in the country of Colombia for two years. Learned a ton, learned Spanish, and learned, like, really, what the Peace Corps is about is just, like, realizing that we come from different places, but we kinda tell similar jokes and wanna laugh and wanna have good fun. So made good friends and, yeah, good memories too.
• 6:55
  Scott Anthony Barlow: That's cool. I love that. I didn't really realize that that was what the Peace Corps was about, honestly. That's actually one of the biggest reasons why we've taken our kids and traveled to many other countries for periods of time to try and help them understand, growing up, that we may all come from different parts of the world, but there's so many similarities, and there's so much sameness in ways that we don't expect.
• 7:18
  So I've never heard anybody say that in terms of, like, that's what the Peace Corps is about. That's really cool. What led you back to tech sales?
• 7:24
  Sam Wright: Yeah, it's a good question. Again, I was kind of like, "Man, what do I do after the Peace Corps?" And, you know, I like to talk, and I like to get excited about technology and passionate about that kind of stuff.
• 7:36
  I also just wanted a remote job. I was kind of, like, not done traveling, so I was like, "Okay, what's a job that I could do that I could continue to travel while also making good money?" And really, honestly, still is kind of the thing that, like, if you're good at tech sales and you're able to work remotely, and you're able to hit your quotas and achieve what you need to achieve, it's a great role for a lot of folks.
• 7:57
  So still to this day, I'm passionate about helping folks get into tech sales. And yeah, it just worked really well for the lifestyle that I wanted to live.
• 8:04
  Scott Anthony Barlow: It seems like your relationship initially with Huntr and what Rennie was doing has evolved quite a bit. Is that a fair assessment?
• 8:12
  Sam Wright: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it's just like, you know, Rennie started Huntr as a founder for three years, solo founder. Incredible origin story. That's a whole another podcast on how he started it and what he learned, and just a really inspiring sort of entrepreneur. And I think that there was just a role to play.
• 8:29
  You know, being a LinkedIn influencer was never on my bingo card at all. But there was a role to play where, like I mentioned, like, we had this great data, and we decided to start working on the resume-building side and really start to change our business. We did a pivot from that more B2B offering to more of a B2C offering, direct to job seekers, direct to candidates.
• 8:50
  'Cause ultimately we're like, "That's really what we wanna get really good at, is can we actually help somebody get an interview?" Right? Like, can we help them build a great resume that increases their application interview conversion rate and ultimately lands them more interviews and ultimately more offers?
• 9:05
  And we saw that we had a lot of data and a lot of insights, and we needed somebody to share that. And so that was kind of the opportunity that I stepped into, was to be more sharing that data, looking into it, using some of the new LLM tools to also, like, make sense of all the data that we're sitting on, and then share it with as many people as possible to support them.
• 9:26
  As Rennie leads the product side, he's a brilliant designer, developer. We've got great people on the team, and they're building a really great product. As that's happening, I get to use my community-building skills, I get to use my skills in sharing information, and in supporting people. You know, I meet with as many folks as I can, learn what's going on in their job search, share that with the team so we can build a better product and help more people.
• 9:49
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So let's talk about that data then. I think one of the things I'm really curious about for you, because you've been around this now for a number of years, what was the most surprising thing that really stood out to you initially?
• 10:01
  Sam Wright: I think one of the first sort of myths that I was able to bust, and then it kind of goes into more of a broader spectrum, was one-page or two-page resumes. Two-page resumes actually perform, on average, better than one-page resumes across the board. You know, entry-level folks, mid-career, senior folks, you know, two-page resumes perform better than one page.
• 10:20
  Now, when I was in school, and I went to the career services department, I was told, "Put your resume on one page only. It has to be one page. It must be one page." And I feel like this is, like, maybe to avoid staples, like back when you were actually handing over your resume. You know, I keep racking my brain as to where, like, what's the logic in that? And what I realized is this is kind of this thing that people just decided was a thing, but didn't have a lot of data or evidence to say that this is important to actually get more interviews, right?
• 10:50
  When I think about it now, it's like, oh, it kinda makes logic sense that like, you know, if you have a really great book that you're reading and you're really hooked with the first sentence, you're like, "This is a great book," you're not gonna be like, "Oh, but it has another page. I don't wanna read that," you know?
• 11:03
  It doesn't make actual sense. And so then I started to really think about a lot of the advice that's given, and where does that actually come from? And for nobody's fault, really, it's just that we haven't had sort of this centralized data set that people are actually open with. In fact, Huntr's probably the one of only a handful of companies in the world that has this type of data and is one of the only, I would be, as bold to say, the only one that's sharing this in a really substantive way and being very transparent with it.
• 11:33
  And that's our goal, right? Let's try and cut through the noise, get data-backed best practices, and do our best to share that with folks.
• 11:40
  Scott Anthony Barlow: This is really interesting in terms of, you know, you're talking about one of the biggest myths, one page versus more than one page, and what you're saying is that, for the most part, two pages.
• 11:52
  But what I'm curious about is what are your best guesses, and I have some of my own, about why two page actually ends up being the best? Is it about the two pages, or is it about something else?
• 12:03
  Sam Wright: I think that's where there's a broader lesson at play, is it's really about the quality of the content. That's what actually matters, and that really goes across all kind of resume advice and insights, right? Does the resume showcase you put yourself forward in the best possible light that you can as it relates to the job that you're applying to? That's the most important thing.
• 12:26
  And people get hung up on this 'cause they'll apply to 50 jobs, and then they won't hear back, and then they'll start panic applying, and they'll be like, "I need to apply to a bunch more jobs," almost all the time. And then it's like almost never do they realize that you actually need to stop and really think about whether you're connecting to that target job title. Is your positioning right? Is that target job title the right one for you?
• 12:47
  And those things are more important across the board. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it with the two-page. But what I really think, for me, it boiled down to wasn't that like, if you have one page now, all of a sudden, like, figure out how to fill into two pages. No, that's not really the lesson. The lesson is use the space that you need to tell the story that you need to share, that's gonna put you in the best light and put you in the best position to hopefully land that interview.
• 13:10
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Yeah, and I think what we've seen is really very similar. And so here's my best guess for why you're seeing two pages be most effective. Again, totally agree with everything that you said. It's not about the two pages, it's about what is the content on the page.
• 13:24
  However, if I had to create a hypothesis for why two pages happens to be the case, I think that generally when somebody has more substantive experience, then it rarely fits entirely on one page to represent it well.
• 13:42
  And if we think about just what you said earlier, like, it's about the content and how well you're representing it, then if we go with that as the goal, I think for people that have that more substantive set of experience, then it just happens to take more than one page. And, you know, for the most part, a lot of people can fit that well into two pages.
• 14:01
  So I think it's much more about that than it is about is two pages the perfect amount. I think that there's probably certain situations. We've seen a lot of them here at Happen to Your Career, where, you know, people have 30 years of experience, and it's in a variety of different areas. But we might choose to represent it on one page because that is the best representation, not because about the one page, but because of how we're representing it just happens to fit on one particular page, and that's the best way for them to market themselves.
• 14:31
  'Cause at the core, a resume is a marketing document, right? So psychology and marketing principles all apply. What I am really curious about, you mentioned the idea just really briefly of whether or not you're tailoring. What have you learned about tailoring, and what does the data say?
• 14:46
  Sam Wright: Yeah. Maybe I can pull this up on the page too, so we have it on the screen. So we do these trends reports, right? So this is our annual job search trends report. Over 1.7 million applications, 1 million job postings, 243,000 resumes that we looked at.
• 15:01
  And this one found, like in our success factors, tailoring was 1.6x more effective at driving interviews. So what this actually means is we were looking at the folks that were using our AI resume tailoring tools versus those that weren't, and so that was kind of a pretty good cohort, right?
• 15:18
  And we could see those without tailoring versus those with tailoring. The tailoring group using that Huntr tailoring tool to tailor the summary section, the experiences, and the skills; they could see better results.
• 15:31
  We also launched our Q1 report and updated this number, and we actually found that it actually slightly increased, so 2x, and this was across, you know, a large portion of resumes here that we were looking at this 78,000 applications across these users.
• 15:47
  So that's where we kind of said, "Okay, there is something to this." Like, this is actually one of the best sort of data-backed interventions that somebody can do to support them in their search.
• 15:56
  Scott Anthony Barlow: What have you learned then, and happy to share what we've seen on our side too, but what have you learned about how to create effective tailoring overall as opposed to just tailoring?
• 16:08
  And here's the reason why I ask. I've talked to, not countless, there's probably a number, but many, many people who are like,
• 16:15
  "Hey, I'm tailoring every resume." So this is the situation. "Well, how many interviews have you had?" "Well, half of one. I got on a screening interview." Okay. Well, tell me about the tailoring process." And we start to go into that.
• 16:26
  So I'm curious what you've seen about what creates effective tailoring versus just the checking the box of tailoring.
• 16:32
  Sam Wright: That's exactly right, 'cause everybody has a different definition, and then you're working off of two completely different definitions. For us, it's a series of five processes that go through for the tailoring process.
• 16:40
  Sam Wright: That's exactly right, 'cause everybody has a different definition, and then you're working off of two completely different definitions. For us, it's a series of five processes that go through for the tailoring process.
• 16:43
  It kind of starts at the job title, right? You wanna make sure that you're putting the target job title that you're applying to front and center on the resume in the header. Then you have the summary section. You want a summary section that aggregates the most interesting, impressive things that you have done in your career as it relates to the job that you're applying to.
• 17:01
  A lot of folks just kind of forget that, like, a summary is summarizing, like, the whole thing, right? I think a lot of folks will leave out metrics and numbers. They'll just kind of make a generic statement. If it starts with the results driven, I would put money on it being written by AI and not, like, not good AI.
• 17:19
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Hey, now, even before AI was around, people were still putting results-driven, and it wasn't necessarily useful then either. So AI is just copying what we've done.
• 17:30
  Sam Wright: Totally agree. Yes, AI is defaulting to the average resume result, which is what it kind of does. So if you want to stand out amongst applications, and you have to, because being 50% in the job search isn't good enough, that you need to be in that top 10%, 5% of applicants even higher.
• 17:48
  So then you have the achievements section, and you wanna highlight the achievements that are most relevant to the job that you're applying to. How do you find that? It's through the responsibilities and qualifications that are listed in the job description, so making sure that you're matching that.
• 18:01
  And a lot of people think like, you know, it's all about keywords, and yes, there's like, you know, you can have a skills section, you can have some keywords that are mentioned in the job description, mentioned in the resume. I think that's kind of default a good thing to have, but it's not the only thing that matters.
• 18:16
  There's context that matters. There's adjacent skills. There's a lot of things that people don't think about, and I think AI tools can help us with that nuance of that tailoring process. But I'm curious, Scott, to just your thoughts on it as well. I know you see a lot with a lot of the job seekers you work with.
• 18:30
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So there's a couple sides to it. Like, let's pretend that you are applying to an HR director role, but you've never had any kind of HR experience whatsoever. There is probably no amount of tailoring that we can do in order to get you into that, you know, top 10%. It's going to require another method if you're wanting to make that transition, and can talk about that, too.
• 18:55
  However, wanna put that out there just to differentiate. Tailoring is not a magic bullet. Tailoring is a way to highly represent what's most relevant to whoever might be looking at it, whether it is, has, you know, some pre-screening criteria that is automated through a system, or whether it is viewed by a recruiter, or somebody in admin, or somebody in HR.
• 19:18
  Like, I've been in all those roles where I've been the person looking at the resumes, where you're scanning for what the hiring manager or whoever you've talked to said that they most want, and you're scanning for those keywords as must-haves.
• 19:30
  However, we've seen that if we do a fantastic job, not just tailoring in terms of keywords and not just tailoring in terms of, you know, how can we pare it back what the job posting says, but if we can go the extra effort and try to determine here is what we think this individual, or this company, or who we believe is going to be viewing it in this company, if we can take that extra consideration, we find that we can get, instead of, like, a 5% bump, we find we can get, like, a, you know, 10 or 20% bump overall.
• 20:05
  Sam Wright: You're totally right, and I can kind of nerd out on it all day. But, you know, the tailoring process, 100%, it's like that extra 10%. It's that polish, right, piece that if you don't have the fundamentals underlying, that's not gonna get you to where you need to be.
• 20:18
  That's why I always say that Huntr works best with a career coach right now as well, 'cause you need that solid base, that solid understanding of the direction, of the job title, of all of that. I would say, like, the holy grail in this whole thing would be is if you had a software company like Huntr that has the job seeker side and understands where people are applying to, where they're getting interviews, and had some sort of applicant tracking system that recruiters and hiring managers use and companies use.
• 20:46
  'Cause then you could pair that, right? You could see, "Okay, this company, they actually like people like this. They like resumes that are like this. And these job seekers, like companies that like this." Yeah, I think that would be one of the biggest companies in the entire world if you had all of that put together, because it means you would be able to allocate labor more efficiently than anybody has ever been able to do before. But it's like that would be, again, that's a huge project to work on.
• 21:11
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Maybe another side company for another day, Sam. And I think, you know, to your point, I think that would be so valuable because with all the different sets of biases, industry differences, you know, company differences, practice differences, et cetera, there's so much waste in the job search process.
• 21:27
  So much waste by organizations, so much waste by job seekers, and unfortunately, that waste is painful for everybody involved. And I like where your head's at 'cause that could actually solve some of those problems or at least eliminate a lot of the wasted effort, and ghosting and everything else that happens along with it.
• 21:46
  One thing I did want to ask you about, though, is that target job title. Okay, so let's pretend for a second, like, we've got quite a few people in our world here at Happen To Your Career that are really interested in making career pivots, career changes, and they may not necessarily have specific experiences for the target job title that they're interested in, or they might be interested in a variety of target job titles.
• 22:11
  I wanna talk about that for just a second. Not just in what you see in the data, but what recommendations you might have for those people based on what you've seen in the data.
• 22:19
  Sam Wright: Yeah. I mean, I think what the data say is that, you know, the last job title that you had is gonna be the most likely that you can get an interview for moving forward.
• 22:27
  So, if you were a marketing manager, and you're looking for a job, and I need to get you a job tomorrow, you know, I'm gonna say apply to marketing managing positions, right? But some people are done with marketing, and they wanna go into HR, like you said, and it's like, okay, we're gonna expect to see a lower application interview conversion rate.
• 22:46
  And then I go back to the checklist, and I think you mentioned this quite a bit about, like, kind of referrals, right? Like, getting a referral is hands down the best way that you can get an interview. It's very low percentage. It's like 1% of all applications come from referrals, but they represent a massive amount of the applicants that actually get interviews.
• 23:04
  Scott Anthony Barlow: When you're thinking about referrals, define that for me. What do you mean when you say a referral? 'Cause I think not everybody is necessarily familiar with what that is or what that could mean.
• 23:14
  Sam Wright: Yeah, it's a great question, and there's not a lot of data on this either. There's a handful of studies on, like, you know, referrals and their impact.
• 23:22
  The majority of jobs have a referral at some point in the job process. That could be an internal referral, right? Somebody internally. Others are, you know, friends and family refer people, and that's, like, one of the more common groups of people that will refer folks to jobs. Or third-party people, like your little LinkedIn connections that you've never met in person, but they actually end up, you know, sending a note to the hiring manager 'cause you went through there. So there's all these different levels of what a referral actually is.
• 23:51
  Scott Anthony Barlow: What advice would you give to people who are maybe getting some results, but not necessarily getting what either of us have described as great results as it relates to getting to that interview stage?
• 24:05
  Sam Wright: If you are applying to jobs and you're not hearing back, then you know what you should do is focus on one target job title at a time, apply to 10 to 20 jobs per week, do your networking approach, do your outreaches, tailor your resume to match the job description.
• 24:20
  Try to be within the first 24 hours or within the first 100 applications of a job being posted. Sometimes you can see how many applicants are there. Those are huge things as well, 'cause if you're applying to jobs that were posted two weeks ago with 700 other applicants, you're probably just not gonna be seen, and that's not being ghosted, right?
• 24:37
  That's just the reality is that you missed that process. So that consistency is important, that motivation is important, 'cause the data says that that actually helps in terms of getting interviews.
• 24:46
  Scott Anthony Barlow: When you think about the other types of data that you have experienced, what has been the most powerful set of learnings for other people? Not necessarily what surprised you, but for other people as you've shared it.
• 25:01
  Sam Wright: It's just the boogeyman that is the ATS. And so commonly, I get questions about, or I get told, like, "But I'm optimizing my resume for the ATS," or, you know, all of these things. And this is something I just wanted to share really quick is around templates and formatting for resumes.
• 25:16
  This resume template sees the highest application-to-interview conversion rate for all of our resume templates. That's not factoring in all the tailoring, not factoring in any of that kind of stuff, but it's just a clear, simple, easy-to-read resume template. Having a good template like this that's easy to read, clean, clear, all of that, you know, a lot of people fear that two-column resumes are terrible. Don't ever do them.
• 25:41
  We have a couple of two-column options for folks, and they perform just as well. It's, you know, like, maybe a percentage difference. So just wanting to make sure people know, like, for your resume, make it clean, clear, easy to read for a hiring manager that's reviewing hundreds of applications, and just wants to be able to scan and get to the good stuff as quickly as possible. That's what it's really about.
• 26:03
  Scott Anthony Barlow: That's the piece most people skip. They'll polish a resume for weeks before they've ever stopped to ask whether the target job title is even the right one for them, and no amount of tailoring can fix that. A great resume can help you get in the door, but it can't tell you which door to walk through, and that's exactly why we created the career change guide that I mentioned on the front side of this episode.
• 26:22
  That guide is free completely. When you go to the link that's in the show notes and description, you can get it for free. It walks you through the entire process of finding work that's actually meaningful and pays well. It doesn't just focus on resume tips or tricks alone. It definitely doesn't focus on finding your passion or learning to love a job that isn't right for you.
• 26:41
  But instead, it's intentionally designed to help you gain an understanding of the real stages of change. So the tactical stuff that Sam and I talked about today can be built upon a solid foundation. Check out the show notes, or you can go directly to happentoyourcareer.com/guide. It's free. It comes in both PDF and audio, so you can read it or listen whenever you've got a few minutes. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.