The Dragon Profile
The hustle of having an online profile for finding a job
Greetings from a (again) rather overcast Amsterdam, perfect weather to stay indoors, grab a coffee and do some thinking. As I am on the lookout for a job for myself (again), there is something on my mind we all have to deal with, whether we like it or not: the modern resume, CV and that ever-scrolling LinkedIn profile. Especially for those of you jumping back into the job market right now, only to discover that the system has leveled up while you were away…
For us geeks, optimizing a system is second nature. But what happens when the system we are trying to optimize is ourselves?
The Optimization Hustle and the ATS Dragon
In the good old days, your CV was a simple, factual document. You wrote down what you did, where you studied and maybe threw in a line about your hobbies just to prove you weren’t a robot. It showed you were up for the job, plain and simple…
But nowadays? It’s a completely different ballgame. You might be competing against 1.500 other applicants for a single role, so you feel the pressure to become a 99,9% perfect match for the job description. If the old Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was a dumb dragon that just hoarded shiny keywords, the updated beast you are facing today is likely ATS version 2.0 or even 3.0. It doesn’t just scan for exact phrases anymore; it tries to infer context, grade your experience and match your semantic profile against 1.000s of other candidates. It is an algorithmic gatekeeper and honestly, trying to beat it by its own rules can feel like trying to bike against a brutal headwind on the Keizersgracht…
The Ghost in the Machine
We have to tweak our profiles continuously just to get “reach” and to be “seen”. And look, gaming the system is an old profession. I get it. We use the right keywords, we format for the parsers and we make sure the algorithms feed our names to the recruiters…
But here is the thought-provoking part: these modern profiles are correct, factual and in most cases entirely truthful... but they completely erase the person... Kind off…
The actual humanity, the quirks, the humor, the unique traits that make you an interesting colleague to sit next to, gets boiled down to sterile business facts... We strip away our personality and replace it with HR mumbo-jumbo, catch-phrases and buzzwords that only a recruiter’s scanning software responds to... We are essentially turning ourselves into walking SEO articles...
We are left with this bizarre Catch-22. You either play the game, strip away your humanity to appease the keyword scanners and maybe get an interview where you then have to desperately prove you actually have a pulse... or you write an authentic, human-centric profile and risk never being found at all. Apply and get ignored, or refuse to play and remain invisible…
The Trojan Horse Strategy
You cannot ignore the dragon, but you can kind of trick it into letting the real you inside the castle walls. We need a solid middle ground. Below a little sum-up of my personal experiences, tips-and-tricks I got from people that know this sh*t, and distilled it into 3 points:
Feed the Machine its Data: Dedicate a specific, highly structured section of your CV purely to the hard specs. List your skills, software and certifications exactly as the job description phrases them. If they want a “Data Analyst” do not call yourself a “Numbers Whisperer”. Give the algorithm the 10.000 data points it craves so it checks its little boxes.
Contextualize the Impact: The new dragon likes context. Instead of just saying “managed a team”, say “managed a team of 5, delivering the project 2 weeks early”. Numbers and clear outcomes satisfy the parsing logic while showing a human reader that you actually get things done.
Keep the Summary Human: This is your Trojan inside the horse. Your professional summary is where you drop the corporate-speak. Once the bot flags you as a match and passes your CV to an actual human HR rep, this is what they will read. Make it punchy, let your personality bleed through and explain why you do what you do. Pro-tip: you can be a professional without being a robot. For reals!
The Ultimate Bypass
Honestly? The absolute best way to beat the ATS dragon is to not fight it at all. In the tech world, and pretty much everywhere else, the “backdoor” (or actually “frontdoor”), is networking. A solid referral bypasses the algorithm completely. If you find a job you like, find the team lead or the internal recruiter on LinkedIn and send a direct, polite message. People hire people; algorithms just filter them...
It is incredibly frustrating to feel like you have to compress your entire human experience into a machine-readable data file just to get a paycheck… But keep your chin up. Feed the machine the strict facts it needs, but keep your tone authentic enough so that when a real person finally reads it, they actually want to grab a coffee with you…
I think I need a fresh stroopwafel to process all this corporate dystopia… Do you think the system will ever swing back to valuing the human element first, or are we permanently stuck optimizing ourselves for the machines? …