Searching for a new job is stressful; no one will argue that fact. You work hard to make your resume informative without being too verbose, precise without drowning in detail, and interesting without sounding trite. After all that hard work, it can be disheartening to know that computer software is reading and profiling your resume long before a human ever lays eyes on it. This interesting information came from Money Talks in their article, “The Key To Getting Your Resume Noticed.”
Employers and recruiters are turning to applicant tracking systems to help them sort, filter out, and keep track of the overwhelming number of applications they now receive for every job position advertised. The downside of this is that a machine will most likely read your resume first. It could get rejected purely because the software can’t read it properly, due to formatting errors or confusing wording.
There are tips to help applicants design and write their resumes and cover letters to work with the system instead of against it in the article. The one I found the most interesting was “Don’t copy-paste from a Word document.” Word embeds invisible formatting code into your text, and that code can render your resume unreadable.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
