So you probably know that most online job postings receive hundreds of applications, and that hiring managers don't have time to review every single one. So a lot of bigger companies. And frankly, now a lot of the smaller companies are using what's called an applicant tracking system and ETS, to sort through your resumes, scan them and store them efficiently, and also tell them which candidates they should review. Which means for us that there's a step between writing our resume and someone actually reading it, which, I admit is a bit annoying, but it makes sense on their end, so we have to be prepared. So what steps do we use to make these automated resume scanners happy? I'll show you right now.
So first, you're going to want to keep your format simple. Everything that we've talked about today in terms of formatting will work perfectly for a resume scanner. The things to avoid are just using separate columns or big blocks. have color to separate your sections. We just want to use words and the occasional underline. Next, make sure you're using your keywords that we found while we were dissecting the job posting.
The trick with keywords is that you want to use them but you don't want to overuse them. So if you find an important keyword, use it once. Use it twice, maybe three times. But if you go beyond that, the resume scanner is going to label you as someone who has used keyword stuffing, which it then penalizes you for. So make sure you're not overusing those keywords. You can use synonyms where you need to, but that's sort of the the guideline for keywords.
Avoid graphics and images just because the information will not always get picked up by the resume scanner. If you do have a graphic or image that you really need to include. Make sure that information is also included in plain text. I've personally never used any graphics or images for any clients of mine and it seems to work just fine. So generally avoid doing that next stick to a common font we talked about this already Calibri Times New Roman Tahoma all excellent fonts next do not justify text this is you know when we're talking about left justify right justify justify is when we have the text going all the stretched from right to left so it covers the entire width of the page. The resume scanner is sometimes have trouble with the spacing that this creates on the page and it doesn't pick up all the words so just stick with left justified.
In within each of your sections, you're going to want to use reverse chronology, doing everything listing everything from most recent to least recent. Avoid using the header and footer tools in your resume just because this resume scanners don't always pick those up. Stick to the generic section titles like we talked about earlier the work experience professional experience relevant experience how You want to label that. Unfortunately, those more direct section titles like marketing and communication experience that I showed you earlier, those aren't always going to be picked up by the resume scanners and categorized the same way. So unfortunately, we can't use those if we're applying to jobs online like this. Stick to simple colors talked about this earlier, black and white, maybe a dark blue, or something else if you if you feel like you want to add that.
And finally, just remember that after the resume scanner approves your resume, a real person is going to read it so we will still want it to look nice and be readable to the human eye.