[Full Disclosure: I am the Director, Product Marketing for Talemetry]

Industry partners and end-user customers rely on Talemetry’s resume extraction capabilities everyday to solve the challenge of accurately and efficiently capturing resume data. With over 80 million resumes extracted and processed each year, Talemetry is the most relied upon provider of resume extraction technology.

Given the amount of resumes we process, I thought I‘d share some interesting stats on how candidates are applying for jobs. First let’s start with traditional resumes.

Traditional Resumes

• Microsoft Word is still dominant

          -        Microsoft Word formats account for 77.7% of all resumes processed

          -        The most common format is still Microsoft Word 97 at 55.1%

          -        Docx files (from Microsoft Office 2007+) are finally catching up with 20.5% (increasing every year as more people upgrade their Office version)

• PDF and other formats are catching up

          -        PDF accounts for 8.2% of resumes, which is significantly more than a year or two ago

          -        HTML, Text and Richtext account for most of the remaining 12.7%

• Other word processors are not very common

          -        Open Office and Apple iWorks only account for 0.3% of resumes

          -        The remaining 0.5% is composed of 28 other miscellaneous document formats and versions.

In addition to allowing candidates to apply by uploading a traditional resume, we also allow candidates to apply using their social networking profiles. While the number of applications received through social profiles is still a minority in comparison to traditional resumes, we expect to see growth here as more people continue to build more information-rich online profiles.

Social Profiles

• LinkedIn is dominant over Facebook

          -        Candidates are 7 times more likely to apply using their LinkedIn profiles versus Facebook

• Demographics

          -        Males represent 58%

          -        Heaviest usage among 18-24 year olds, followed by 25-34

Regardless of whether a candidate applies using a traditional resume or a social network profile, resume extraction reduces the amount of information a candidate is required to manually enter creating an easier and more positive candidate experience. Understanding the formats your candidates want to use when applying is also key in designing a candidate friendly application process.