Forget The Forms

Application questions

“MBA Candidate” is a true sentence. Software keeps the middle of it

A degree in progress is honest on a résumé and ambiguous to anything reading for keywords. The word doing the work is the one most likely to be dropped.

Keyword readers look for qualifications by name. Candidate, expected, in progress, coursework toward, pursuing: these are the qualifiers that make the line true, and they sit outside the thing being matched. What gets recorded is often the qualification on its own.

Layout makes it worse. Plenty of résumés put the school and graduation date on one line and the degree on the next. That reads perfectly to a person; to anything reading line by line, it splits the qualifier from the qualification.

Then the application form asks for your highest level of education as a dropdown, and there is no option on the list for a degree you are most of the way through. Whatever you choose, there is a claim, and it is the one field on the form where the honest answer is genuinely awkward to give.

See it on your own résumé. The résumé scan shows you which of your lines could be read as a finished qualification. It runs in your browser, it describes wording only, and it checks nothing about you.

What this tool does with it

It does not promote an in-progress degree to a finished one. A résumé line reading “MBA Candidate” never becomes an MBA in an education dropdown; the question is left for you instead. The file it uploads is your own résumé, unchanged. No date, number, or qualification gets rewritten on the way to an employer.

Which does mean an education dropdown is one of the fields it hands back to you most often. That is the honest outcome of the rule, not a gap in it.


Read next