What is an ATS, and how do New Zealand employers actually use them?

Which NZ employers use an ATS and which do not

Large employers, government agencies and recruitment agencies commonly use one. JobAdder, founded in Sydney and part of the SEEK Group, is used by recruitment agencies, including in New Zealand. PageUp counts Michael Hill among its customers, and organisations such as AsureQuality and Hato Hone St John run their careers pages on SmartRecruiters. Public service jobs on jobs.govt.nz need a RealMe login, and some listings send you on to the agency's own careers site.

Small businesses are different. Many take applications by email or through a job board and read every one themselves. If an ad asks you to email a named person, there is probably no system in the way at all.

Public sector applications often add questions in the form itself, such as answers to the key selection criteria. Our guide to the public-sector application explains how to answer them.

What the software actually filters

An ATS does a few things automatically, and they are worth knowing:

• Knockout questions. Yes or no questions at the start of the form, such as whether you have the right to work in New Zealand or a particular licence. Workday's documentation, for example, shows rules that automatically decline candidates who are not eligible to work in the country. Answer these carefully and honestly.
• Parsing. The system reads your CV into fields: name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates and skills. If it cannot read your CV, those fields come out wrong or empty.
• Search and ranking. Recruiters search the applications for skills, titles and qualifications, and some systems now rate each applicant's relevance. JobAdder, for example, offers an instant summary and relevancy rating on every candidate.

Past the knockout questions, the shortlist is made by people, and the software shapes what they see first.

Formatting that survives parsing

Parsing works best on a plain layout. A few choices make a real difference:

• One column. Two-column layouts can be read across the columns, mixing your skills into your job history.
• Real headings, such as Experience, Education and Skills, so the system knows where each section starts.
• Text rather than pictures. Skills shown as bars or icons, and text inside images or text boxes, are often lost.
• Job title, employer and dates on one line or close together, in the same format for every role.
• Word or a PDF created from text, unless the ad asks for something else.

The CV Builder is free and needs no sign-up. It lays a CV out in a single column with real headings and no boxes, in the New Zealand style, and downloads it as a PDF. Our guide to writing a CV in New Zealand covers what to put in it.

The keyword myth versus the recruiter search reality

A claim often repeated online is that ATS software automatically rejects around 75% of CVs. No published research supports it; writers who have traced it follow it back to Preptel, a company that sold CV services and closed in 2013, with no study behind the figure. Treat any figure like it with suspicion.

The real concern is simpler. A recruiter searching for "payroll" or "Xero" finds CVs that contain those words. If you have the skill but describe it differently, you may not appear in their search. So use the employer's words for the skills you genuinely have, in context: "processed fortnightly payroll for 140 staff in Xero" works better than a list of keywords at the bottom of the page.

Stuffing a CV with words from the ad, or pasting the ad in white text, does not work. A person reads the CV before any interview, and a CV written for software reads badly to a person.

Checking your CV against an ad

Before you apply, read the ad and mark the skills, qualifications and tools it asks for. Then check your CV: is each one you have mentioned, in words the recruiter would search for? Is anything essential missing that you could honestly add? Our article on how to read a job ad covers how to separate the essentials from the wish list.

In jobtracker.co.nz, you can upload your CV once with a free account, and in Everything mode each job whose ad you have saved shows which of the ad's words your CV is missing, so you can see where it needs work for that role before you apply.

Check your CV against every ad