Context: My parents are both retired. They are tech savvy (my dad was an electrical engineer) but have been out of the job application world for a long while.
I'm in the process of tweaking my resume for my dream job. Good pay, lots of working outside, beautiful area. I'm going through the job description, pulling out key words, and slapping those bad boys into my resume. I'm talking over the process with my mom as I'm doing it. I copied a key phrase over and she said, “You can't do that!”
“Why not?”
“That's plagiarism.”
“No it's not.”
“You can't just copy their words.”
“They have computers check to see if your resume and cover letter have these key words in there before even looking at your application. If you don't have them, your application is automatically junked.” (ATS if you want to dive into a rabbit hole)
“Without them looking at it?”
“Yep.”
“That's stupid.”
“That's the game.”
It also happened to be one of those applications where you have to retype your entire resume into their own fields after you post it. her immediate question, “What's the point of even uploading a resume?”
“I have no idea.”