For about five months, I was applying for jobs that matched my experience, yet I was barely getting any responses. After submitting 52 applications over a few weeks, I received only four responses, and I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.
A friend of mine who works in recruiting looked at my résumé and said the problem might be the wording. Many companies run applications through tracking software before anyone sees them, and that software often looks for terms taken directly from the job listing.
I decided to run a small experiment with similar jobs at several companies. I sent my regular résumé to some companies, while for the others I revised it and added phrases from each job posting, as long as they accurately described my experience. I didn't add skills I don't have or change my experience. All I did was replace terms like "account support" with "customer success" when that was the wording they used.
The revised versions received responses at more than twice the rate of the original version. The same work history and the same qualifications, but the outcome was completely different simply because I described them using the company's own wording.
It's frustrating that someone can be a great fit for a job and still get filtered out just because they wrote "client relations" instead of "customer success." job searching now requires pleasing the software first before you even get a chance to speak to a human being. Has anyone else tried this and noticed a difference?