If you apply for a position at a large company, there is a
chance that a human won’t even look at your resume. Many human
resources department now use application tracking software (ATS) to help
them sift through hundreds of applications.
While this saves them time, it means that promising
applicants might get tossed out just because their resume don’t have the
right keywords. Startup Jobscan helps job seekers figure out how to craft their resumes or CVs to get past ATS.
“There are people who were working for ten or twenty years
and then they got laid off or had to switch jobs. Now they don’t even
know how to find a job because when they first started working, they
could write a resume, mail it in and it would be reviewed by a real
person,” says Hu. “But now you are just a record in the system.”
Hu was inspired to develop the software because he had
trouble finding a job in the U.S. after a two-year stint working in
China. He’d spend hours poring over job descriptions for keywords to
insert in his resumes, but rarely heard back from companies.
Hu built Jobscan, which was launched in January 2014 and
is currently bootstrapped, to automate the process of identifying
keywords in order to increase the chances of landing an interview.
Recommendations from college career service departments and
organizations that aid people searching for jobs helped the startup,
which claims to have scanned more than 100,000 resumes so far, gain
traction.
There are more than 300 applicant tracking software
systems available and Jobscan says it is able to identify keywords used
by 90 percent of employers.
The startup differentiates from other resume tools like
Resumebuilder.org by focusing specifically on keywords. Jobscan
automatically finds important terms and phrases in a job description and
shows users how frequently they appear. Then it compares their resume
against the description and makes suggestions on how to improve it.
In a job description for a software engineering position,
keywords not only include programming languages like C++, but also terms
that are related to the software development cycle such as “product
management,” “product vision,” and “STLC (software testing
lifecycle)—industry-specific patois that many applicants might not think
to include until after they read dozens or hundreds of job
descriptions.
Many of Jobscan’s users are nurses, veterans, software
engineers, sales staff, and teachers. Hu says Jobscan can process
resumes for almost any kind of job right now, but the startup, which
includes co-founder Michael Lee, a former Google engineer, is
improving the platform to include more specific job functions.
The software will also be expanded to include support for different languages.
Jobscan currently monetizes through a subscription plan.
Users get five free scans per month, but the startup gives 50 free scans
to people who have been unemployed for a year or longer.
Hu says Jobscan makes enough revenue to be self-sustaining
and is currently reinvesting its earnings into features to make the
software more usable.
“Our demographic of users include people who are less
technically savvy,” says Hu. “Some are older and they sometimes want to
print out the results and take it to their career coach so they can work
together and figure out how to improve their resumes.”