Resume Matcher – An open source, free tool to improve your resume

Stop shotgunning your resume to dozens of companies. Research a few companies where you might actually want to work. Do this from time to time even if you aren't looking; don't wait until you are desperate for work. And the most important thing is to actually have something to offer. If you do the bare minimum and accomplish very little, you probably aren't going to trick some great company into hiring you with resume tricks.

You're looking for a new senior developer, starting in the next few weeks. That means with your 4 rounds of interviews, you want to start the first round within the next week or 2. Your engineers have capacity to do the 4 rounds for ~10 applicants in that time.

You receive 1000 applications.

You don't have time to read every resume and start calling people in the next few days, so you build a tool to automate it. The tool parses text from PDFs, tries to categorise it into "experience", "projects", "location", so you can exclude people with The tool correctly parses 500 of the resumes, and finds 50 who match your experience, location and skill requirements. Now you manually read those 50 properly, and reach out to the ones who stand out.

That tool is the ATS. You don't care about the 500 who couldn't be parsed, or whether some of the 470 were parsed incorrectly. It's not a test of the user's ability to follow rules. It's just a necessity to get hiring done in a reasonable time frame.

We are in the early phases of a recession. The tech-cession is already in full swing. Inflation is through the roof.

There are very few jobs hiring relative to layoffs. Every optimization, no matter how stupid, matters.

Capitalism rewards the razor thin margins, regardless of how filled with puss and scum those margins are.

I have many friends and acquaintances who tell me what it's like from their perspective. Sure, there are tons of job listings on sites like LinkedIn and others. And yet, for some, the experience seems to be sending hundreds of resumes with little or no feedback and even fewer interviews. Some have resorted to writing short one-page resumes custom-matched to the requirements listed in the job post. In some cases they claim this produces better results. However, we are still talking about what I interpret to be in the 5% response rate.

One of my friends got so frustrated after going through a six-interview hiring process in one case and seven interviews in the other --and not being hired-- that he found himself a job in the oil fields in New Mexico manually recording readings every hour while he lives in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. This, after a long career in various technology fields. He fears age discrimination might have a lot to do with it.

So, yeah, not sure how human-to-human contact happens if people never get a response after sending hundreds of resumes. When we need to hire, my rule is simple: Everyone gets a response. Everyone. Because, on the other side of that resume is a dad, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. How would you like to be treated? How would you like others to treat those you love? Well, then, the answer is simple. If you are using AI or mechanized processes, you are treating people like cattle.