Career coaches and employment specialists have been using Jobscan’s resume and LinkedIn optimization tools for years to supplement their coaching and provide more value to their clients.
We reached out to five coaches and specialists across North America to learn about the different ways they’re using Jobscan, whether it be a personal free or Premium account or enterprise-level Jobscan Premium or Coach accounts:
- Lise Stransky, private and contract career coach and facilitator based in Calgary, Alberta
- Bob McIntosh, LinkedIn and resume consultant at the Career Center of Lowell
- Ruth Kunstadter, Career and Transitions Coach at New Pathways Coaching, LLC
- Hannah Morgan, Assistant Director of Simon Business School’s Career Management Center at the University of Rochester
- Jen St. Pierre, Warriors to Work Specialist at Wounded Warrior Project
“I am not a resume writer,” said Lise Stransky, who uses the Jobscan resume optimization tool right off the bat to ensure her clients are bringing a quality resume to the table before she gets to work. She tells her clients, “I would really recommend you customize your resume before you send it to me and pay me for a review, and here’s a tool to see how well you’ve already customized it.”
Bob McIntosh, on the other hand, likes to utilize Jobscan to put the finishing touches on a client’s resume. “When we have their resume to what they think they like, I will pull up Jobscan and paste their resume as well as their job description. That’s when they can really see how successful they are in terms of keyword match and the percentage.”
Here are a few ways advisors are providing value to their clients and students with Jobscan:
1) Jobscan is a wake-up call for job seekers
“It’s eye-opening for people,” said Ruth Kunstadter. “People think they have a good resume for what they’re trying to apply for, but a lot of them don’t.”
When it comes to helping a job seeker improve their resume, sometimes the first step is proving to them that there is room for improvement. When a job seeker sees a Jobscan Match Report with a low rating for the first time, it can cause them to take notice.
“Usually their [Match Report] grades aren’t that great and they’re really shocked,” said Lise. “Shocked that their resume is so, what they would say, ‘poor.’ I say, ‘No, it’s not poor. It’s not targeted.'”
“Whatever it takes to shift that mindset,” said Hannah Morgan, “because this has been going on for years where [the student job seekers] would send that same unmodified resume to every job without customizing it like it was 1980.”
2) Jobscan validates what coaches are teaching
“It’s an eye-opener because it’s a tool that shows them what we try to tell them, which is pick out the keywords in a job posting,” said Jen St. Pierre. “That’s the employer’s language.”
Career specialists have known for a long time that carefully tailoring your resume to a specific job description leads to more opportunities. Getting buy-in from clients who don’t want to put work into each resume is the hard part.
“[Jobscan] really becomes an advocate for us as job coaches to show the realism of it, that we’re not just making this up,” continued Jen. “Many of us have backgrounds in recruitment. We used to write job postings so we know. It’s one thing to tell somebody, it’s another to send them a link to a detailed report that shows it in black and white.”
“It’s a good validation in terms of what I’m trying to say about tailoring resumes,” said Bob.
“The numbers are right there,” said Ruth. “It’s not like a person telling you that. The machine is going to look at your resume and this is what the machine is going to see. It’s objective.”
3) Jobscan motivates and holds clients accountable
Because the resume is scored with hard numbers and objective facts, job seeking clients can build clear-cut goals around resume improvement.
“‘Let’s get that number up,'” Jen tells her clients. “It gives them more of a challenge and a reason.”
She continued, “I can do two or three rescans and they’ll feel the pride of watching that number go up.”
As a Warriors to Work specialist, Jen can analyze resumes on a veteran’s behalf through her unlimited Jobscan Premium account. “They don’t have to pay,” she said. “It’s already included in my contract. I love that I have unlimited because it gets me to teach them and have them come back for more.”
At the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, Hannah has installed enterprise-level Jobscan Coach accounts for the staff advisors through Jobscan’s University program. Through Coach, Hannah and the other advisors are able to provide Jobscan Premium accounts to students, interact with them directly through Jobscan, and monitor their progress. This promotes accountability in the students and ensures that everyone is using the resources available to them.
“I wouldn’t know how many of the students were using [Jobscan] if I didn’t have the Coach platform,” said Hannah. With Coach, Hannah can offer better direction to the advisors she works with. For example, Hannah said she might tell an advisor of an inactive student, “‘If they’re asking to meet with you, I would expect you to find out how many jobs they’re applying to and then find out why they’re not using Jobscan because it’s a tool that we’re giving them for free and it’s going to make a difference.'”
“I can also see how high they have been able to get their scores in an easy visual graph,” continued Hannah. “It shows the different scores that they’ve had when they’ve uploaded their resume.”
4) Jobscan helps job seekers understand applicant tracking systems (ATS)
“One of the things I see all the time with people that I’m working with in job search, they cannot understand applicant tracking systems,” said Hannah.
Most companies, including 99% of Fortune 500, use an ATS to manage, search, and filter applicants.
“I think students really still believe that recruiters are looking at every resume that comes through the applicant tracking system,” Hannah continued.
Instead of reading each resume, recruiters can search for resumes based on keywords, or allow their system to automatically rank applicants by comparing the resume to the job description. Because of this, coaches know that job seekers increase their chances by transferring keywords from the job description directly to their resume.
“Most people are shocked that technology has done this to job search and they don’t quite get that a resume has to be customized and targeted every single time,” said Lise.
“I think that Jobscan makes it super simple for anybody to understand what they’re supposed to do,” concluded Hannah.
5) Jobscan saves time for job seekers and coaches alike
“One of the reasons I was excited to use Jobscan at this point in the year [is that] students are in a mad dash to try and find jobs,” said Hannah. “As a result, they don’t think they have time to customize their resume. They’re afraid and don’t want to miss out on the opportunity, so they just keep sending out the same old resume. We know that that’s not effective, especially since these students are only using the applicant tracking system process. Jobscan [gives] them the tools to apply to more jobs more quickly and be a better match.”
“The majority of the advisors and student workers who were using it said, ‘Yeah, this is definitely going to save time for the students and for me,'” continued Hannah. “If they’ve been using Jobscan before they meet with me, I can look at a resume that’s a much better version of what it should be and it makes it easier for me to analyze and help the student modify.”
“What we used to do before we had Jobscan is type that all out in an email, because if I did it over the phone it just goes in one ear and out the other,” said Jen. “I would type it all out: don’t use the same action word, measurable results… it would take me forever because every resume was different. Jobscan has really made me more efficient and effective in what I do. I’m not having to take the time to type this all out in an email. I literally cut and paste and send them a link.”
6) Jobscan goes beyond ATS
“I really like it not just for the ATS stuff,” said Ruth. “It makes people reframe their view of how they’re presenting themselves and how human eyes would view it.”
Focusing the resume for human readers
The process of optimizing for ATS can also make a resume read more clearly for a human recruiter.
“I always tell people, you need to give [recruiters] the 3-year-old connect-the-dots version,” said Ruth. “If it’s human eyes looking at your resume, they’re going to have between 3- and 6-seconds to decide if you meet their needs.”
“Part of what I’m doing is training them on how to approach employers and the job search process from a value proposition point of view,” said Ruth, “linking themselves to the employer’s needs rather than bringing a three-page resume listing every single job. It’s not about what they did, it’s about what they can do for the company. I think that using Jobscan is a really good way for them to see how they’re seen by a person looking at the resume.”
LinkedIn optimization
Jobscan isn’t just about resumes. Coaches and employment specialists can also use Jobscan to guide their clients to a more effective LinkedIn profile.
“Most of our students are not really embracing LinkedIn,” said Hannah. “I’m trying to be that advocate and say, ‘You need this tool for the rest of your career. So it’s gonna pay to start investing in learning how to nurture relationships and how to present yourself now.’ I think that [LinkedIn Optimization] is a phenomenal asset of Jobscan, and I’m so glad that you have introduced that tool.”
Jobscan loves coaches. Coaches love Jobscan
Lise: “It’s a visual representation that a lot of people understand. I’m very happy with it.”
Ruth: “It’s so user-friendly that I don’t need to walk them through the first part of it at all.”
Jen: “I just love it. It continues to get better and better. There’s just so many facets to it.”
Hannah: “Overall it’s helping our staff level-up.”
Jobscan’s mission is to provide the best tools for job seekers. If you’re a career coach, employment specialist, or university advisor, learn more about how you can empower your clients or students at these pages:
- Partners – Bring Jobscan to Your Organization
- Coach – Provide Premium Accounts for Your Clients
- Individual – Get a Jobscan Account for Yourself
