OVERSEAS INTEL

RESUME WRITING TIPS: How to beat the applicant tracking system

October 2, 2021 | Hiring Information

resume-writing-tips

Error-prone applicant tracking systems kill 75 percent of job seekers' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes, despite how qualified they may be. Job seekers' only hope for rising through these systems is to understand exactly how these systems work and how best to optimize their resumes for them. Here are five insider tips.

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Applicant tracking systems are the bane of legions of job seekers. These systems, which employers use to manage job openings across their enterprises and screen incoming resumes from job seekers, kill 75 percent of candidates' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes.

The problem with applicant tracking systems, as many job seekers know, is that they are flawed. Very flawed. If a job seeker's resume isn't formatted the right way and doesn't contain the right keywords and phrases, the applicant tracking system will misread it and rank it as a bad match with the job opening, regardless of the candidate's qualifications.

The problems with applicant tracking systems beg the question: If they're so flawed and if they filter out good candidates, why do employers bother to use them? The answer is simple: Bersin says they still make recruiters' lives easier. Applicant tracking systems save recruiters days' worth of time by performing the initial evaluation and by narrowing down the candidate pool to the top 10 candidates whose resumes the system ranks as the most relevant. Even if some good candidates get filtered out, recruiters still have a place to start.

As long as employers rely on applicant tracking systems to screen resumes, qualified job seekers' only hope for passing through them successfully is to understand exactly how these systems work:

How Applicant Tracking Systems Rank a Resume's Relevance

Many job seekers and career experts think applicant tracking systems rely on keywords to determine the fit between a candidate's resume and a specific job. They do their best to identify keywords in a job description that may be important to an employer or applicant tracking system, then they stuff these keywords in their resumes.

In fact, what matters most to applicant tracking systems is the uniqueness or "rarity" of the keyword or the keyword phrase, says Ciampi. That is, the keywords and phrases must be specific to a particular job ad. Applicant tracking systems, which "see" all job ads a company has ever published, determine which keywords and phrases in a specific job ad are unique to that job ad, says Ciampi.

The systems then develop a ranking based on how closely a job seeker's resume matches each keyword and phrase and how many of the keyword phrases the job seeker's resume has, he adds.

What Recruiters See When They Look at Your Resume in an Applicant Tracking System

When a recruiter clicks on the name of a candidate whom the applicant tracking system has ranked as a good match for a job, the recruiter doesn't see the resume the candidate submitted. The recruiter sees the information the applicant tracking system pulled from the candidate's resume into a database, as the picture below shows.

Applicant tracking systems contain different database fields for information on a resume, such as a candidate's name, contact details, work experience, job titles, education, employer names, and periods of employment. These systems try to identify this information on a job seeker's resume, but if a resume isn't formatted according to the applicant tracking system, it won't pull this information into the proper fields. Some of it might be missed altogether, such as a skills profile or an executive summary, says Ciampi.

5 Tips for Optimizing Your Resume for an Applicant Tracking System

Job seekers can increase their resumes' chances of getting through an applicant tracking system by heeding the following do's and don'ts:

1. Never send your resume as a PDF: Because applicant tracking systems lack a standard way to structure PDF documents, they're easily misread, says Ciampi.

2. Don't include tables or graphics: Applicant tracking systems can't read graphics, and they misread tables. Instead of reading tables left to right, as a person would, applicant tracking systems read them up and down, says Ciampi.

3. Feel free to submit a longer resume: The length of your resume doesn't matter to an applicant tracking system, says Ciampi. It will scan your resume regardless of whether it's two pages or four. Submitting a longer (say three or four page) resume that allows you to pack in more relevant experience and keywords and phrases could increase your chances of ranking higher in the system.

4. Call your work experience, "Work Experience": Sometimes job seekers refer to their work experience on their resume as their "Professional Experience" or "Career Achievements" (or some other variation on that theme). "People get very creative on their resume because they think it will help them stand out, but in fact it hurts them," says Ciampi. "Often the computer will completely skip over your work experience because you didn't label it as such."

5. Don't start your work experience with dates: To ensure applicant tracking systems read and import your work experience properly, always start it with your employer's name, followed by your title, followed by the dates you held that title. (Each can run on its own line). Applicant tracking systems look for company names first, says Ciampi. Never start your work experience with the dates you held certain positions.

Meridith Levinson covers Careers, Security, and Cloud Computing for CIO.com. Follow Meridith on Twitter @meridith

Africa, a goldmine for military contractors

October 1, 2021 | OVERSEAS INTEL, The Danger Zone

PMC

In recent years, U.S. military operations in Africa have greatly expanded. Washington has established forward operating locations (FOL) and drone bases. It has helped various African countries, like Liberia, retrain their militaries. It has tried to track rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the East African terrorist group like Al-Shabaab. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has been involved in wide-ranging activities.

Thanks to the work of a very few journalists—like Nick Turse who has greatly enhanced our understanding of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Africa or Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post who has exposed problems at U.S. drone bases—there’s more information about these expanded operations.

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But one aspect of U.S. military operations in Africa remains vastly under-covered and unappreciated: the role of private military and security contractors (PMSC).

Out of Africa

Domestic private security in Africa, which targets criminal activities, is widespread. But there are also a number of large transnational PMSCs who, along with their subsidiaries, guard mining sites, train national militaries and police, and provide security for development or humanitarian agencies. Even international development or UN peacekeeping/peacebuilding operations sometimes contract with PMSCs for various logistical support services.

It is fitting, in an ironic sense, that modern PMSCs should be operating in Africa. After all, Africa gave rise to much of the modern PMSC industry. The pioneer in the field was the South African-based Executive Outcomes (EO), which shut down in 1998 after having fought Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA group in Angola and the murderous Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Even earlier, mercenary “companies,” such as 5 Commando, fought in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere during the 1960s. Companies such as the Dutch VOC or the British South Africa Company were the tip of the spear for colonial occupation and exploitation,.

PMSCs are the U.S. military’s American Express card: it dare not deploy overseas without them. This is nowhere truer than in Africa. As a recent article in Geopolitics notes:

more than anywhere else in the world the US military presence in Africa is dependent upon PMCs that perform a variety of services, from transporting and housing personnel, to shipping materials and food, to providing medical support, to conducting surveillance… Soldiers operating out of remote facilities require services like food, fuel, beds, laundry, internet access and actionable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data that are provided by a heterogeneous web of contractors ranging from small African trucking firms, to American intelligence companies, to massive multinational corporations.

A contractor-provided plane and crew were crucial to a secret surveillance mission performed in support of France’s Operation Serval in Mali in 2013. That mission involved the deployment of a plane equipped with High Altitude Lidar Operations Experiment (HALOE) technology, developed by the Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA). HALOE reportedly allows “unprecedented access to high-resolution 3D data” due to its ability to collect information “orders of magnitude faster and from much longer ranges than conventional methods.” By way of comparison, DARPA’s director estimates that the program could map half of Afghanistan in 90 days.

What Contracts Do Best

As the article points out, contractors are particularly useful for maintaining a low profile, particularly when it comes to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). When the U.S. military does this work itself it does so via large drones like Predators and Reapers, which means, large, noticeable, highly visible bases.

Contractors, on the other hand, are highly unobtrusive. That’s something highly desired by African states who wish to keep their relationship with the U.S. government off the radar. As the Geopolitics article noted:

A 2009 State Department cable from Burkina Faso, which was a key site for covert, contractor-based ISR flights over Mali and Mauritania under a programme called Creeksand—especially when flights from Mauritanian bases were temporarily suspended following a coup in 2008—relays a request by the government to move US planes to a different part of the airport in Oagadougou so as to “meet Burkina Faso’s objectives to maintain discretion concerning American presence.” It also states that Burkinese officials appreciate that “U.S. personnel were extremely discreet and did not attract undue attention.”

Similarly, a contractor-based ISR program named Tusker Sand, operating out of Entebbe, Uganda since 2009, has been part of a campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Contractors are also a key enabler for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) in Africa, helping them get to where they fight, which isn’t easy given Africa’s vast size. The Geopolitics article said:

This is especially true of SOF teams who conduct operations across a wide swath of the Sahel, Maghreb, Central and East Africa and rely heavily on US-based flight contractors. For instance, a 2013 solicitation for a Trans-Sahara short take-off and landing (STOL) contract to provide casualty evacuation and personnel and cargo airlift for Special Operations Command, Africa (SOCAFRICA) states that contractors will be required to fly both day and night missions from “improved and unimproved airfield landing zones” and that “it is anticipated that the most likely locations for missions… would be to: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia.

Finally, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors also provide base operations and life-support services to US military sites and operations in Africa. In some cases, these contracts are awarded through established channels such as the U.S. Defense Department’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).

In other instances ad hoc solicitations or no-bid contracts are used… due to the small size of the base, temporary duration of operations, or difficulty in identifying qualified providers. In June 2015, for instance, the Marine Corps solicited bids to provide base-support services for up to four months for twenty-four soldiers conducting training exercises with the Ugandan military at Camp Singo in Uganda in the fall.The US frequently uses Camp Singo –which is located roughly seventy kilometres northwest of Kampala – for training exercises with Ugandan and other African military contingents, and has even established a small fenced compound with buildings, tents, water tanks and generators. But rather than permanently stationing troops there it rotates them in as desired, relying upon short-term contracts for base and life support. Ad hoc logistics contracting, in other words, facilitates AFRICOM’s stated goal of organising force posture “to maximize operational flexibility and agility.”

Top 5 Defense Contractors who profited the most from the war in Afghanistan

September 30, 2021 | OVERSEAS INTEL, The Danger Zone

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A hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban overpowered the government and took control of the capital left many wondering what happened to the trillions of dollars spent over the last two decades since 2001.

Around $300 million a day was spent according to a Brown University calculation – that was spent on private contractors to power the logistics. Private contractors served largely as hired guns, but also as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, technicians, and servers on sprawling U.S. bases.

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The employment of private security contractors in Afghanistan soared during former President Donald Trump’s tenure to nearly 6,000.

Almost 17,000 contractors operated in Afghanistan, according to documents prepared for Congress by the Defense Department earlier this year ahead of the withdrawal. This number dropped to 7,800 as of July.

In the months leading to the end of the 20-year war, major defense companies were awarded contracts in Afghanistan worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In terms of lives lost, contractors paid a higher price than U.S. service members since the beginning of the U.S.’s longest war. About 3,814 contractors had been killed in Afghanistan as of late 2019, compared with approximately 2,300 troops, according to the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

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Afghan government relied on foreign military contractors and trainers to function, said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in March.

The three largest defense companies in the world are all U.S. companies. Their combined revenue accounts for 1 percent of the $10 trillion U.S. GDP, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The price of shares in several of the world’s largest defense contractors sank in August as the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan led investors to reassess their commitments to beneficiaries of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Here are the five military contractors that ate up as much as $2 trillion of the money the U.S. Treasury spent in Afghanistan over the last two decades.

lockheed-martin

Lockheed Martin

Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defense contractor that deals in global security and aerospace products. It employs about 114,000 people worldwide.

Lockheed made $65.4 billion in sales in 2020. If you bought and held $10,000 of this company’s stock in 2001, it’s now valued at $133,559.21.

Lockheed is best known for its Black Hawk helicopters which were widely used in the Afghan war. The big bucks for Lockheed come from contracts for the F-35 stealth fighter ($12 billion in the current budget alone), the combat systems for Aegis cruiser ships, and lots of electronics for command-control, cyberwar, and space communications.

boeing

Boeing

Boeing is best known for its commercial airliners but its big-ticket defense contracts relate to the B-1 bomber, B-52s, C-17 cargo jet, V-22 Osprey vertical take-off aircraft, and F-15 and F-18 fighters. All were in Afghanistan.

“Seeing first-hand how these troops count on Boeing ought to make us redouble our efforts to ensure we give them the best equipment we can,” said Brian Nelson, a spokesman for Integrated Defense Systems at Boeing, after a visit to Afghanistan in 2009.

Raytheon

Raytheon Technologies Corporation, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is an aerospace and defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military, and government customers worldwide. It has 195,000 employees worldwide who work in avionics, cybersecurity, directed energy, electric propulsion, hypersonic, and quantum physics.

Until 2020, it was known as Raytheon Company before it merged with the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses to become the third-largest defense contractor in the world.

Apart from selling weapons to governments across the world it also offered military training in Afghanistan. Its big contracts were for a new nuclear cruise missile, strategic missile defense systems, and a lot of projects dealing with sensors, satellites, electronics, and cyberwar.

General Dynamics

General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics is a defense and Information technology contractor headquartered in Reston, Virginia. It was awarded a task to provide information technology management services in Afghanistan to support the U.S. Army corps of Engineers (USACE) Middle East District reconstruction and infrastructure development programs.

The task order was awarded under the IT enterprise solutions contract and had a potential value of $32 million over five years. It also had multibillion-dollar contracts for nuclear submarines, Burke-class destroyer ships, and on the commercial side, Gulfstream jets.

Northrop Grumman Corp

Founded in 1939, Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide. Northrop Grumman’s Europe air traffic management systems subsidiary, Northrop Grumman Park Air Systems, was awarded a contract by NATO to provide a second air traffic control receiver site for Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan.

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