SharpeDidntFoul

I paid someone $250 to get my resume past ATS systems, it worked.

I kind of rambled on about this in another comment on this thread, but I paid someone $250 to optimize my resume with key words to appease AI. It worked. I got automated replies to schedule phone screenings from jobs that had rejected my old resume. It's already happening.

You can pay about $250 for someone to optimize your resume with certain key words, punctuation, and formatting choices to make it through these systems. I did this and it worked. I was going for entry level finance roles in tech and finance. I went to a top 40 finance program, interned at Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund, and a respectable incubator, but had a hard time getting replies to my job applications. I used all the help and resources from my university's career center and followed everything on the infamous "Mergers and Inquisitions" website, which is supposed to be the holy grail of career guidance and resume formatting for finance majors. I had my resume looked at my everyone I could get critiques and edits from. I wasn't getting answers from my applications. After hiring someone to change the formatting, I got automated replies saying that they liked my resume and would reach out to schedule a phone screening. Same person, same level of "professionalism" on the resume, same experience, just different key words and seemingly arbitrary formatting choices to please the AI overlords.

I found 5 people claiming to optimize resumes for algorithms for the sorts of jobs I wanted. They all had high reviews from customers. I then asked them all questions through email and phone calls to see if they actually knew what they were talking about. I picked the one who appeared the best. Not only did she have some personal proximity to the space, but she seemed to know all of the nuances of how to please the resume algos. It was the best $250 I ever spent.

Point is, people are cracking these processes, it feels arbitrary but that's how the game works now if your a job seeker. Whether if be something like a resume screener or something of this level that claims to be able to understand your personality in 25 minutes, you can crack the system. If your hiring, I can't imagine how confusing this whole mess is on top of your already busy work day, but it's easy to manipulate these screening software products to make them think whatever you want. I've met many sketchy software sales people who just schlep useless enterprise products at businesses. I wonder how much of the enterprise SaaS world is made up of this sort of thing.