liantze/AltaCV

ATS friendly?

harsham05 opened this issue · 3 comments

harsham05 commented

@liantze Is AltaCV Applicant Tracking System friendly?

logological commented

@harsham05 Which ATS are you talking about and what criteria must be met for a CV to be "ATS friendly"?

marcusfechner commented

I think the question depends on the ATS system used by the company.

There are several websites were you can parse your resume and check if an ATS finds the correct information from your resume.
(But don't use their services, which are overpriced, etc.. They just wanna scam you in using their services.)
Here are some links:

Generally the PDF will be parsed to a text file first and then it will be processed by the ATS system.
You can check the output of your PDF as a text here: https://pdftotext.com/

From my experience the information from the resume can be parsed, but the order is messed up.
So instead of reading the left column and then the right. It will read blocks from the left column, then from the right and again from the left, and so on. I hope I could somehow illustrate it below.

Your PDF

| L1 R1 |
| L2 R2 |
| L3 R3 |

Parsed text:
L1
R1
L2
R2
...

However, the order of bullet points, text blocks is preserved and words are not scrambled.
As order should not matter that much for an ATS system, it should pass the ATS.

I hope I could clarify some of your concerns.

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liantze commented

Thanks @marcusfechner . Interestingly pdftotext -layout sample.pdf can produce a .txt that roughly mimics the two-columnar layout (that is, if you used paracol in the .tex).

Perhaps with the help of the accsupp help package, the icons in \personalinfo and the scores in \cvskill can have "copyable" plain text that would make more sense for pdftotext and similar utilities.

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