Cost saving is the biggest challenge and goal for startups and small businesses. They can’t afford to buy costly services at the initial stage of business. That’s why they keep looking for alternatives that are low in cost, no matter if that low cost solution requires some extra effort.
In such a scenario, the HR department cost hurts a lot to a newly born startup. Apart from the personnel salaries, the HR systems like HRM and ATS are quite costly with monthly subscriptions. Both matters can be resolved with their low cost alternatives.
In this blog post, we will specifically look at the low cost alternative to ATS i.e. Automatic Tracking System. Now here if I say that I’m going to present the Image-to-Text Tool as an ATS alternative, you may get astonished because there’s no link between them. But I’ll explain how this free tool can be helpful to HR managers if they don’t want costly ATS.
What is ATS?
ATS is a handy yet smart solution or tool for HR managers. It helps them filter out the CVs and resumes from bulk. ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. It simply rejects the CVs and resumes automatically if the given criteria are not met.
So when you post a job, hundreds of people will apply to it and almost 60 to 70% of submitted CVs or resumes will be irrelevant. If you open and read every CV to check, it will take ages, and you will become bored and tired at the same time.
Here comes the ATS as a smart solution and filters out the irrelevant applications as they are submitted to the system. But the ease and comfort never come free. You will have to buy or subscribe to get this ATS.
You will have to pay a good sum every month to enjoy this ease. And as a startup, you are already looking for no-cost solutions.
So let’s move to our no-cost idea which can somehow serve as an alternative to ATS.
How Can Image-To-Text Serve As Alternative to ATS?
Well, that’s a big question teasing you since you started reading this blog post. But the wait is almost over as I’m going to reveal this here.
The main purpose of ATS is to filter out the submitted resumes and CVs. But here in 3rd world countries, most of the businesses and startups still accept CVs in hard form i.e. paper printed CVs.
For a new startup, it will be difficult to manage high subscription costs. Wages level is so that businesses can hire a data entry operator at the cost of an ATS subscription.
So how can they filter out these printed CVs at no cost?
Well, the no-cost solution that seems to be reliable is using an image-to-text converting tool. By using these tools HR managers can convert CVs into editable formats.
But why do they do that?
How is this going to help them in filtering out the CVs?
Look CVs often come in different formats. Finding the relevant information on each with a different format can take a lot of time and seems to be very irritating.
But, by converting the CVs into editable text they will be able to summarize the information of the candidates. This summarized information will eliminate the struggle required to review CVs in different formats. Plus, HR managers can review the summarized information of a candidate quickly and decide which one to keep or which one to discard.
Now let me show you how this process will go on in real life, so you’ll be able to adopt this cost-free solution as well.
The process will consist of two steps.
First, we have to convert the CV into editable text.
Second, we need to summarize it to quickly review the information.
Converting CV into Editable Text
To convert a printed or non-editable CV into editable text, you will need a reliable photo-to-text converting tool like Imagetotext.io. Below is how the process will go on.
- Take a clear picture of the CV and upload it onto the tool.
- After uploading, all you need is to hit the submit and extract button.
- Let the tool process the image of the CV. Wait till the output box appears.
- Copy the text from the output box. You can also download the complete editable TXT file.
Below you can see the result of a CV I made editable using the same process. But keep in mind I have converted only one CV to an editable one to show you the process. You can convert multiple CVs at once.
Now that we have got the CV text the next step is to summarize the information. For this, you have to follow the below steps.
Summarizing the CV
To summarize the CV, you are going to need a reliable tool. For this, simply Google “AI Summarizer” and choose the one that appears on the top. After opening a tool follow the below steps.
- Place the text of the CV you have extracted onto the tool
- Hit the summarize button to start the summarization of CV.
- Once the tool has completed the summarization process change the output to bullet points. You can do this by clicking on the show bullets button.
Below you can see the summarization results I got using the same process.
As you can see the summarized information in bullet points presents all the necessary information about the candidates. This will enable HR managers to quickly decide on candidates.
How Effective is this No-Cost Alternative to ATS?
Well we have seen that we can use Image to text and online summarizing tool as alternative to Applicant tracking system. But we also observed that this no-cost solution will require extra efforts and that’s what I had mentioned at the start of this blog post.
So, this no-cost solution is not as effective as ATS is but still it somehow serves the purpose. It doesn’t automate the application filtration process but eases it to a good extent. HR manages can go through the summary of applications rather than reading each application and CVs from start to end.
In a Nutshell
Applicant tracking systems are a smart solution to filter out the CVs. ATS can be costly for some new startups with limited budgets. However, there is a cost-free solution that can somewhat act as an alternative to ATS and help them filter out the CVs. By using image-to-text tools and AI summarizers HR managers can filter out the CVs at no cost. I hope that after reading this blog post, you have a better understanding of how image-to-text tools can be an alternative to ATS.
