95% of multinationals and 50% of SMB use dedicated software called Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to select their candidates or automatically reject the résumé containing disease, inactivity or a blank period.

Cancer@Work, an association striving to conciliate work and cancer, wanted to find a way to overcome this discrimination, considering that cancer patients develop precious human qualities which could be turned into valuable skills for companies.

We had two objectives regarding this blank period the résumé: first, change the negative perception patients can have on themselves when it comes to talking about that period of their life. And, change the perception of weakness recruiters instinctively have when seeing a blank on a résumé.

The language of disease turns people into victims. “Patients” passively wait and suffer, “survivors”, “spared”, “lucky”… Plus: they lose their hair, lose weight, journalists use “cancer” for society’s worst evils. With cancer, what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

So employers feel sad or sorry, but not impressed or interested. They pity, but don’t employ them. They want skilled and able candidates.

So we decided for the first time to turn that can be perceived as a weakness by recruiters into an infinite strength.

We gave cancer patients the opportunity to create résumés via a dedicated platform by collecting data. On it, they can select the soft-skills they developed during their disease.

The soft-skills people can select were chosen according to the most relevant keywords searched by recruiters and also by collecting testimonies of former cancer patients about what soft-skills their disease brought them.

a personalized text telling their story and the soft-skills they developed while facing the disease is automatically generated and integrated into their résumé, written in white-on-white. Softwares used by companies will - for the first time - recognize the strength of cancer patients - and so recruiters will.

70% of cancer survivors still seeking for employment 2 years after diagnosis. The first challenge was to get them back in the business and help them to valorise their experience in a professional way. Second was to highlight ATS technology to raise awareness among recruiters of the role of human intervention in the recruitment process. So we first gathered the most relevant soft-skills searched by recruiters. Then we crossed them with former cancer patients testimonies from which we extracted the soft-skills they get while facing the disease.

We turned these informations into a tool which will help former cancer patients to pass through the recruitment softwares, considering that these ones automatically reject disease, inactivity or a blank period. The platform unstoppableresume.com allowed them to turn the hardships they went through into an infinite strength. By filling the blank period on their résumés with all the most researched soft-skills, former cancer patients can now tell their stories and make it hearable by recruiters.

The Cancer@Work association already has a large community of members, patients and former patients. First, we capitalized on this very active audience to launch the campaign. Second, we launched the campaign in the middle of cancer control week to maximize the chances of getting coverage in the mainstream media.

For the first time, recruiters and companies were able to really face what cancer patients went through.

The Unstoppable Résumé changed the way recruiters consider cancer patients and their skills by generating more than 80 million earned media impressions. Amongst them, traditional and professional media, as well as famous French TV shows, like "Le magazine de la santé". More than 10 000 CVs have been generated in 39 countries around the world. Major recruiters from multinationals also greeted the campaign on Twitter.