The more and more people with whom you speak may lead you to believe that something profound has happened in the job search world that has gone mostly unnoticed.
Insofar as job seekers are concerned, it would appear that we now live in a two-resume world.
When most of us entered the workforce, you created a resume and that was it. Today, however, that’s no longer the case.
First there is standard, conventional resume. That’s the one that you take to networking events; that you send with cover letters; that you share with colleagues and contacts.
Even within the confines of the traditional resume, it’s not unusual for some job seekers to tweak their core documents to fit any variety of job specifications or descriptions. For example, if a job posting requires experience with a specific type of equipment or software, if you don’t highlight, feature or even mention that experience in your resume, you’ll find yourself left out.
Therefore, a separate dedication version of your resume may be necessary.
But now there are these animals that have invaded the job-search world called Automated Tracking Systems, or ATS. These refer to the software that many companies now use to scan resumes so as to conduct an initial separation of the wheat from the chaff and to reduce the number of applicants to a manageable amount.
The challenge for today’s job seeker is to create a second, ATS-friendly resume that won’t be excluded from the legion of resumes submitted to the company. To qualify as ATS-friendly, your resume adhere to certain guidelines such not having any extraneous design features or text in boxes. It appears that the electronic resumes have problems with such characteristics and reject those resumes.
To assist you in preparing your ATS-friendly resume, the job search website Jobscan.com features 20 ATS-Friendly Resume Templates. If your resume is not getting through the scanners, you might want to take a look at these samples.
In this day and age, you may be required to prepare more than just for an interview, or to conduct background on the employer… you may have to have an entirely separate resume.