Until a decade ago, making a resume was all about standing out visually to catch the eyeballs of the recruiters. That was the past. Today, most recruiters out there use bots and AI technologies to automatically scroll through submitted resumes and detect the profiles that best fit the job description.
This job-search new deal may puzzle many job seekers out there who are used to design a one-page visually-attractive resume with sparkles and eye-catching features. Here are a few tips to adjust your resume to the new world order of job search.
Robot-readable resumes
In SEO, when working on a website’s page structure, the website developer is expected to follow the 3w guidelines regarding text formatting and page structure.
This means use <title>, <h1>/<h2>, … headers the titles of your resume and its paragraphs. Use <ul><li> formatting for lists, instead of the ” – ” hyphen, and avoid out of the blue fonts. On a Word doc, that means you need to use the formatting tools available there (title, title 1, title 2, bulltetpoint list, …).
Also, avoid sidebars, which we often used before to squeeze qualifications and other relevant info on the right or left side of the resume to keep it a one-pager. On a Word doc, there are different options to insert a sidebar, but they are all pretty messy in terms of robot-readability. Your resume must remain a one-column doc where the info is laid out from top to bottom.
Images are pretty much unnecessary, as a bot will not take it under consideration.
Ultimately, do not use Photoshop or Illustrator to create your resume, as those will render unstructured PDF docs that will confuse the hell out of a bot.
Exact-match keywords
In SEO, when targeting a specific keyword, the first thing to do is to use this exact keyword across your web page or website. To feed a resume-analyzing bot with positive feedback, the same approach must be considered. Therefore, if you are applying for a “sales assistant” position, make sure the word “sales assistant” is spread throughout your resume: In the intro sentence, in your past job titles and descriptions, in your education curriculum if possible, in your other qualifications…
The trick in SEO is to avoid the overuse of targeted keywords, but instead:
- Use them in strategic areas of your web page, such as title, subtitles, job descriptions, … ;
- Use related keywords that are closely related to the targeted keywords on a semantic level. For example, the keywords “customers”, “CRM”, “prospects”, “email marketing”, and so on are all potential keywords that will reinforce the validity of the main targeted keyword in a text.
Ultimately, avoid using any sentence that is not keyword-strong, such as “I strived to create a positive work mentality by applying strong work ethics”, unless of course the job you are applying strongly emphasizes on those keywords in the job description.
Proofread your bot-friendly resume
Eventually SEO pros always turn to a SEO-analytic service to verify their optimization work is efficient. For job seekers, a few services out there are readily available :
- Jobscan analyses your resume and cover letter to tell you how optimized they are for the job you are looking for. The service is a one-stop shop for resume and cover letter builders.
- Resume Worded is an alternative to Jobscan and offers a few alternative products.
- Many similar services exist on the web today, just do a “analyse+resume” search on Google and choose the right one for you.