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Thursday 20th of November 2008

How to ensure recruiting software can read your resume.

By Riges Younan

With the increasing use of technology for the screening, matching and the sourcing part of the recruiting process your resume will increasingly not be read by a human until after it is read, parsed, and classified by a computer. So forget about the pretty graphics and nice borders because it may look like good to the hiring manager or recruiter but it looks like this ‘;anf;oasdfpoahs;gasfughv;asdnfg;asubfg;auhd’ to the computer (and just in case you are like me, not technical.. that’s not code.. it’s just me telling you that it’s a mess).

Here’s what to remember

1. You resume must be in Microsoft Word format. Not HTML, PDF, WordPerfect or RTF.

2. Looks are deceiving: Plain is good, Fancy is bad. No headers & footers, no graphics, no tables in Word, no fields in Word - and don’t use resume templates particularly resume templates from Microsoft (sorry Gatesy!)

3. Don’t mix font types or size for data. Sounds boring I know but it’s the actual content not the way that the content looks that’s important to recruiters and hiring managers.

4. Capitalisation does matter. Don’t use CAPS unless you need to.

5. See what your resume looks like in plain text. Resume systems convert the resumes into plain text and then they read and process plain text.

6. Contact info comes first. If you want a job, let people know how they can get in touch to chat.

7. Use common header terms to start resume sections. [Job Objective] [Education]

8. Don’t use columns or tables for formatting anything.

9. Keep like data in order. [Dates] [Company] [Position Title] [Description]

10. Do not combine sections.

11. Always end company names with common company name words. eg Pty Ltd, Inc, LLC, Ltd.

12. Omit page numbers.

13. Put skills into work history descriptions. eg: Sales, Developer, HTML, CSS, Management etc

14. Don’t put references on your resume, EVER.

These are some high level points. When you sign up as a member on 2Vouch there is a link to a much more detailed document with specific examples in the “Update My Profile’ tab.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Recruiting, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

comments to “How to ensure recruiting software can read your resume.”

Sjors Provoost said at September 21st, 2008 12:41 pm :

Thanks for the tips! I just recently started the whole lets-get-a-job thing and I found myself incredibly annoyed that I could not just upload my simple 2 page PDF CV at a lot of sites. I found myself even more annoyed by sites that tried to parse it (and failed). But it is very enlightening to read about this from the other side of the fence, so thanks for this post.

I generally don’t like to change my behavior to suit the system: the system should serve me, not the other way around. That applies to traffic lights just as much as recruitment sites. However, I am also a fan of pragmatism and complaining about the situation won’t get me a job, so I’ve definitely taken notice here.

Ideally, and perhaps you can make a contribution towards this goal, there should be a universal standard to list employment history, skills, hobbies, etc. I would love to be able to put that online in one place and then use it everywhere else. I see two major problems:

1 - even if someone came up with such a system, they would probably do everything within their abilities to lock their users in. That in turn would ruin it’s usability but not necessarily their business plan. I’d say LinkedIn demonstrates this a little bit.

2 - it is extremely difficult to get this right. There is no one size-fits-all solution. The traditional list of employers and industries for example is great for people who spent their whole life doing 1 particular thing, but a lot less useful for people (like me) who do a lot of different things. Especially if the official description of these things doesn’t really say much about the content. And don’t even get me started on GPA; just because you can sort by it, doesn’t imply it means anything.

In light of point 2, I was very pleased to see that you are experimenting with tags for skills. I’m not saying tags are the ultimate solution, but it does break with the 19th century CV tradition and that is a good start.

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