You’ve hopefully put a lot of time into creating your resume and so it becomes difficult to understand why you send out scores of them and never hear from potential employers.

It could be because those employers are never seeing your resume. Rather, they have software screening the mountain of resumes they receive to search for key words that match the skill set they want.

I write about this problem in Always Be Job Hunting and discuss it in my talks on job hunting, but even I was amazed by a recent article I saw in which one source is quoted as saying 70 percent of resumes are never seen by human eyes.

Every resume starts a blank slate. What words you put on it can be the difference in getting an interview.

“Employers large and small now use applicant tracking software to parse the information from your resume and map it into a database called an ATS. From this information, the system will assign you a score based on how well you match the job the employer is trying to fill, and then rank and sort all candidates,” the article quoted Mona Abdel-Halim, co-founder of Resunate.com, a job application tool, as writing on a blog.

How to beat the software at its own game? Scan the ads you answer carefully for what seem key skill terms. Put those into your resume, which means customizing your resume for each ad you answer. Ir may sound like work, but finding work is work, as I write in Always Be Job Hunting. The sooner you do it, the more likely you’ll be to hear from perspective employers.
John N. Frank