Career advice

Resumes

3 reasons hiring software skips your resume

By Jon King, recruiter and founder of Role Rewritten

You've probably heard that robots reject most resumes before a person ever sees them. That's not quite how it works, and the real version is more useful to know.

Most employers use an applicant tracking system, or ATS. When you apply, the ATS pulls the text out of your resume and stores it in a database. Then a recruiter, a real person, searches that database. They type in a job title, a skill, or a certification, and the system shows them the candidates who match. Some applications get screened out by yes-or-no questions on the application ("Do you have a forklift certification?"). But for most experienced candidates, the problem isn't rejection. It's being invisible.

If the software can't read your resume, or reads it wrong, you don't show up when the recruiter searches. Here are the three reasons that happens most often.

1. Your contact details are in the header

Many resume templates put your name, phone, and email in the page header, the strip at the very top that repeats on every page. It looks clean. But some tracking systems skip headers and footers when they pull text, so your application arrives with no phone number and no email.

The fix: put your name and contact details in the body of the page, at the top. If you're not sure, open your resume in Word and double-click the top of the page. If your name lights up in a separate header area, move it.

2. Columns, tables, and text boxes scramble the order

A two-column resume looks great to a person. To software reading left to right, line by line, it can come out mixed together: half a job title, then a skill from the sidebar, then the rest of the job title. Text boxes and graphics are worse; some systems skip them entirely. Skill bars and star ratings carry no words at all, so they add nothing a system can read.

The fix: keep two versions. Use a designed resume when you email a person directly or bring copies to an interview. Use a plain, single-column version when you apply through a company's website. Every Role Rewritten order includes both for exactly this reason.

A quick test you can run today: open your resume, select all, copy, and paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad. That's roughly what the software sees. If the text comes out jumbled, out of order, or missing pieces, the system is seeing the same mess.

3. You're not using the words the recruiter searches for

This is the big one. A recruiter filling a warehouse manager role might search for "WMS," "OSHA," and "labor planning." If your resume says "managed the warehouse system" and "kept the team safe," you won't come up, even if you've done all three for 15 years.

Recruiters search using the language in the job posting, so that's where your keywords come from.

The fix: before you apply, read the posting and circle the specific skills, tools, and certifications it names. Wherever those are true for you, use the same words on your resume. If the posting says "P&L responsibility" and you managed a $12M budget, write "P&L responsibility for a $12M operation."

One warning: only use keywords that are true. A recruiter will ask about every line in an interview, and a keyword you can't back up costs you more than a missing one.

What this doesn't fix

Getting through the software only gets you in front of a person. That person spends about 10 seconds on a first look, and what they're scanning for is numbers: how big your job was and what changed because of you. A resume that's easy for software to read but lists duties instead of results still won't get the call. That's the next article: how to rewrite one bullet from a duty into a result.