Being a part of a consulting firm, staffing agency, vocational school, or recruitment agency, you can very well understand the pain associated with formatting resumes manually. It might, however, ease you a bit to know that the latest technology-enabled resume formatting service can alleviate your pain to a great extent.
Bringing fully automated resume formatting services on board and integrating them with the existing ATS has a proven track record of formatting a resume in less than 10 seconds.
The only thing which consumes time is defining or customizing the template as per the company’s needs. Once the template is set and activated, resumes are formatted within the blink of an eye. The best resume formatting services are available online, office apps, and iOS apps.
Without further ado, in this article, we will go over:
- What is a resume formatting service?
- Advantages of using resume formatting services.
- Does your business need resume formatting services?
- Time taken to format a resume.
- Features of an online resume formatting service.
- Best resume formatting services in 2023.
What Is Resume Formatting Service?
To put it simply, resume formatting is just customizing the candidate’s resume into a client-presentable format or as per your company requirements. Resumes are standardized based on your company or client requirements.
The HR department usually needs all the candidate resumes in a particular format. All this is adhered to either manually or using software that confirms that each resume is compliant as per the required format.
This should not be mistaken as a design issue as it is just a process by which the resume information is displayed uniformly.
Are You Still Formatting the Resumes Manually?
As per a survey conducted by the Eremedia group, it was concluded that it might take around 15-35 minutes for a recruiter to format a resume. On average, a recruiter submits at least four resumes per day. Sometimes, resumes are sent as is to the client because the recruiters don’t have time to format them. This often leads to a rejection of the candidate.
By having a look at some hiring statistics based on the survey, you will be able to understand the recruitment funnel better:
- Around 1000 candidates see a job post as soon as the job is posted to an online job portal.
- Out of 1000, only 200 will begin the application process.
- 100 candidates will complete their application process, and the rest will leave the process midway.
- ATS screens 75 resumes out of 100, leaving behind only 25 eligible resumes.
- The hiring manager will see those 25 resumes, and only four to six candidates will be called for an interview.
- One to three candidates will clear the initial rounds to be called for the final interview round.
- One candidate is chosen. Unfortunately, around 20% of those offered a position do not accept.
- These numbers are quite surprising but true!
A hiring manager wants a professional-looking, cleanly formatted resume. After all, a lot depends on the first impression. The software available today easily integrates with the internal staffing agency software and helps streamline the submissions.
Advantages of Resume Formatting Services
The main advantage of a resume formatting service is that a lot of time and energy is saved. Have a look at some of the other important tasks which can be done in the time saved to improve the bottom line of the organization:
- Increase in the number of clients.
- Writing more detailed job descriptions.
- Spending more quality time with candidates.
- Getting faster submissions.
Here’s what this actually means:
1. Increase in Number of Clients
With the additional time in hand, the recruiter can present the company to new clients in their spare time. Account Managers can strongly make a difference by offering and providing more personal care and attention to the clients. Recruitment is a relationship business; the more account managers/recruiters can interact with the clients and hiring managers, the better the business. With increased interaction, they can better understand the job requirements, team requirements, company culture, and more details, which can significantly help submit suitable candidates for the job, increasing the chances of a placement. When you place a great candidate, they become the ambassadors of the staffing company. The hiring managers and clients reach out for more of them, which leads to increased revenue and profitability.
2. Detailed Job Descriptions
The recruiter can now spend more time talking to the hiring manager and the project manager to get the desired job descriptions, skills, qualities, and other team-building traits that are very useful in sourcing the best candidate for the job opening. Here is an in-depth article on writing great job descriptions.
3. More Quality Time with Candidates
Having spare time means the recruiter can spend more quality time understanding the candidates’ expectations, experience, and capabilities. This way, the recruiter can explain the job requirements better and build a good relationship with the candidates. Especially in this current market, it takes more convincing the candidates to take up your client’s offer. With a very low unemployment rate, it is hard to get qualified people for the available jobs. Therefore, recruiters spend more time providing personal care and attention to the candidates. As a result, there is a better chance of closing a deal.
4. Faster Submission
All the resumes are processed in a “first come, first serve” manner. The earlier the resume is submitted by the candidate, the better the chances are of getting called for an interview.
Does Your Business Need Resume Formatting?
Resume formatting is a process of converting a resume into a predefined format that meets the industry standards and is acceptable to clients as well.
Below mentioned are a few reasons why resume formatting is mandatory for staffing agencies, consulting firms, organizations, and other recruiting agencies:
- To remove the candidate’s contact information.
- For better time utilization.
- To encourage blind hiring strategy.
- For Employer Branding.
Let’s explain each one of them in greater detail.
1. To Remove the Candidate’s Contact Information
Many agencies may want to remove a candidate’s contact information from resumes if they don’t want their client to contact the candidate directly. Removing candidate contact details is one of the basic features of an automated resume formatting tool. Even though it is a simple process removing information, it is more about putting the candidate’s name in all the right places. For some templates, the candidate name is in the header, footer, cover page, and sometimes it is in various formats in all the different places. When multiple people are doing this in an organization, there is a good chance everyone is not following the standards.
2. Better Time Utilization
Hiring managers and recruiters have very little time to go through resumes. So, there is every possibility that important information will get skipped or overlooked.
Reading different types of resumes may confuse the recruiter and also increase the reading time per resume. If the information is well sorted and formatted, the recruiter can directly jump to the section of interest, which may include the candidate’s experience, accomplishments, education, etc.
Even from a candidate’s perspective, it becomes easier and quicker to revise the resume for an interview and figure out things that differentiate him from others.
3. Encourages Blind Hiring Strategy
Hiding the information encourages a blind hiring strategy. This will support the organization’s diversity policy and prevent the hiring manager from unconscious bias.
Information such as photos, gender, addresses, university, etc., may lead to bias when the recruiter is able to see it.
4. Employer Branding
Resume formatting allows adding headers and footers, which helps with branding the firm or organization and adds relevant information such as the contact information of the recruiting or staffing firm. Branding also involves other subtle changes not covered by the logo, but very hard to keep it consistent when multiple people are doing it. It is more than likely, every resume from your firm will not look similar since different people do it. Maintaining consistency is where automation makes this very easy to keep the branding uniform across the whole team or organization. Also, when a firm has multiple templates, it becomes even harder to maintain branding consistency. So, in 2023 and beyond, when people are talking more about robots, AI, and automation, resume formatting is one thing you should hand it off to the machines.
Time Taken to Format a Resume
Depending on the work that needs to be done, the amount of time taken to format a resume manually may vary from five minutes to 40 minutes.
On average, it takes 20 minutes for a recruiter to format a resume. But when this similar activity has to be performed on several resumes in a day, the total time that gets consumed and wasted can be very high.
The time wasted could be used for other fruitful activities such as building effective marketing strategies and knowing the candidates personally by spending more time during personal interaction rounds.
Then what is the solution?
The solution is definitely not avoiding resume formatting, as it plays a quintessential role in recruitment. Rather, it is to automate the resume formatting process using a resume formatting service or software. A resume formatting tool formats the resume in less than 15 seconds according to the industry standards and in a very presentable manner.
Features of an Online Resume Formatting Service
An ideal resume formatting tool helps hiring managers and recruiters seamlessly manage their candidates, clients, resumes, notes, jobs, job portal, etc. By integrating a resume formatting tool with an applicant tracking system, the duo offers unparalleled efficiency and well-optimized software, which saves time, money, and energy.
The best resume formatting tool makes it possible to format a resume using bespoke templates in not more than 15 seconds and submit it to the hiring manager at the click of a mouse.
Here are some of the features of an online resume formatting service:
- Unlimited resume templates,
- Accurate, fast parsing,
- DOCx, PDF, or Text formats,
- Custom headers and footers,
- Customized sections,
- Standardized margins,
- Standardize tables,
- Remove unwanted spaces,
- Standardized dates,
- Candidate information suppression,
- Watermarks,
- Highlighted skills section,
- Bold, italic, and underline removal,
- Font and list styling,
- Reorganizing sections,
- Easily format resumes with tables, or multi-column resumes,
- Executive summary,
- Content alignment,
- Tool for office, app, iOS, and Chrome Extension,
- Add cover pages or sections,
- Apply branding colors to the various sections.
Integrating resume formatting service with an ATS
When choosing the right resume formatting service, it is crucial that you check if it can be integrated with your ATS.
Integrating resume formatting tool with an ATS helps with:
- Streamlined Workflow: Integration between a resume formatting tool and ATS allows for seamless data transfer between the two platforms. This helps in streamlining the recruitment process, as recruiters can quickly format resumes and then import them into the ATS without any manual intervention.
- Consistent Formatting: ATS compatibility ensures that the resume formatting tool produces resumes that are easy to parse and interpret by the ATS. This ensures that resumes retain their formatting and structure when processed by the ATS, enabling the system to analyze and categorize the information accurately.
- Improved Efficiency: When a resume formatting tool is integrated with an ATS, recruiters can save time and effort by avoiding the need to format and upload resumes into the ATS manually. This efficiency gain enables you to focus on more strategic tasks, such as candidate evaluation and relationship building.
- Reduced Errors: Integration between a resume formatting tool and an ATS can help minimize errors that may arise from manual data entry or transferring files between platforms. This can lead to a more accurate and efficient recruitment process.
- Data Consistency: When a resume formatting tool integrates with an ATS, data is seamlessly transferred from one platform to the other. This ensures consistency and reduces the chances of losing critical candidate information during manual transfer.
- Optimized Recruitment Process: An integrated system allows recruiters to easily track the entire recruitment process from receiving applications to hiring. Recruiters can also use analytics and reporting features in the ATS to