A resume or a CV is without a doubt one of the most important things when it comes to getting hired. It will show off your skills, your experience and your education. There are many things you should be sure to include in your CV to garner the best results. There is a lot of competition for jobs, so you want to put your best foot forward.
However, whether you want to create your resume by hand or as ResumeBuild suggests, it is important to be aware of the current landscape of technology that HR uses. Many HR teams will use applicant tracking software tools to help stay organized, extract important data from resumes and so much more.
In order to have success in landing a job, you need to craft your resume and CV with that in mind. Without any further ado, let’s look at a few tips to make your resume and CV visible through these data extraction tools.
Include the Right Keywords
Having the right keywords in your resume or CV can be very important. Most data extraction and ATS software skim through resumes and CVs looking for key pieces of information. Oftentimes, this comes in the form of keywords. They will look for some specific keywords or phrases to judge whether you might be a fit or not.
These could be skills, certain majors, personality traits or other qualifications. A good way to find the keywords to include in your CV is to look at the job description or posting. Many of these will be full of important keywords (such as certifications or qualifications required), so be sure to include those. Of course, there are also keywords research tools out there that can help you out, too.
Make Your CV Simple to Scan
Just like a person prefers to look at and read a simple CV, so do ATS and other data extraction tools. This means you should be using a fairly basic and simple format, as well as a standard font and a relatively simple design. The more abstract and creative your resume might be, the more difficulty these pieces of software will have at reading and analyzing them.
ATS generally read from top to bottom and from left to right, like a normal recruiter, so keep that in mind. The most important and crucial information (name, contact info, recent jobs, qualifications etc…) should all be at or near the top. Using a lot of graphics or symbols might look nice, it will only hurt how your resume appears after being filtered through these systems.
Ensure it is the Right File Type
While you might not put a lot of thought into the kind of file type your resume is, you should. The most popular formats are PDF and .docx, however, there are several more than people will use. Generally, a .docx file can be most accurately scanned by ATS tools, so it is always a safe bet to use in most cases.
Of course, go by what the company asks for in the listing, if they offer up a preferred file type. If your resume is a photo or a different file type, be sure to convert it ahead of time so the ATS is able to read it easily. There are many sites and tools out there that can convert most documents in seconds for free.
In conclusion, we hope that the tips and information included in this article can help you may your CV and resume be more visible to data extraction tools.
This is a sponsored article authored by Ashley Lipman.