Applicant Tracking Systems are the recruiters’ gatekeeper, designed to only let the most qualified applicants through for review. Every company has unique job descriptions and your resume needs to be customized for every opportunity. By optimizing your resume’s keywords and categorizations you can ensure that it reaches human eyes.

• Use Word format – PDF is more difficult for ATS software to decipher.
• Highlight the keywords from the job description and then work them into your resume. Don’t exaggerate but find ways to incorporate them into the natural flow of your document.
• Simple bullet points are ideal, never bury essential details in a header or a footer.
• Avoid images, charts, tables or any type of graphic. This type of content is ignored by ATS software.
• Each time you respond to a job post, save your customized resume with a new file name that matches the job title.

Subscribe to an ATS review program that will scan both your resume and the job description, then make suggestions for an optimized resume. Our favorite is Jobscan – https://www.jobscoan.co/home