Spending most of my time on LinkedIn taught me one thing.

That there's a healthy and profitable market in selling resume services. Editing. Keyword emphasis. Coaching. Do's and don'ts. Optimized and ATS friendly templates. Instead of moving beyond it, we are just perpetuating the status quo while capitalizing on known problems.

Bypassing the infamous ATS filter and getting the attention of a hiring manager for an interview.

How did it end up like this?

Imagine this scenario.

Alice posted a job opening in the shiny ATS through which it gets propagated to different job sites. She's hoping that it would get organic and direct applications from qualified candidates. The next day she checked the status and to her surprise, 200 people applied.

Great, there's traction! Except, now comes the part of reviewing all the 200 applications. As she looked through one by one, she realized that there's more noise than signal. Someone just applied randomly. Irrelevance everywhere. Frustrated, she add filters based on keywords, experience, education. Anything that she can think of to filter out the noise.

The filter seems to work as she's seeing more relevant resumes. Yet everyone failed the interview somehow. How could it be? They are all false positives. Keywords matched. Experience seems relevant. So what went wrong?

After learning that there are services that help candidates game the ATS, her frustration led her to believe that it's a waste of time reviewing direct applications. Why bother, anyway?

As you may have noticed, the problem stems from both end. Companies and candidates kept doing the same thing over and over again hoping for different results. There are clearly no winner in this madness.

Direct application is no longer an effective strategy in today's context. Modern companies are relying on referrals and direct sourcing, with the mindset that the best candidates are already employed happily somewhere and need to be enticed to join them.

As a candidate, it's time to approach this differently.

Perhaps you are forgetting that you were hired based on the perceived value that you can provide to your employer. That you can provide the solution to a problem they were facing. Given the value that you can provide based on your knowledge and skills, how do you make it known?

Blogs. Speaking in a conference. Running workshops. Listing down accomplishments and the means through which you achieved it. Networking with people in your dream company. Paying it forward by identifying problems and providing solutions upfront.

You are only limited by your own creativity. Yes, all these methods takes time, effort and patience. It requires you to put yourself out there. To be more proactive in boosting your signal. Given this knowledge, the majority would still stick to the good old method. Spray and pray, contributing to the noise and waiting out on luck.

How about you?