7 Tips to Prepare a Modern, AI-Ready Resume
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine brought her resume with her to lunch. She wanted me to take a quick peek at it to see if I had any last-minute recommendations, given that I write for a living.
I didn’t make a ton of changes to her document — she’d already worked with a professional resume writer from within our state’s local employment services. But the document I reviewed was alien compared to the document I would have created even a decade ago.
Today, the bulk of large companies rely on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and AI-based resume screening tools. Even smaller companies use the technologies as a way to be efficient and cost-effective as they build their teams. That shift means that applicants are being forced to make sure the software can easily read and understand their documents. That, in turn, has completely changed how resumes need to look and sound — I summarize the basic problem in the video below:
The slides below highlight the major areas to watch as you create your resume.
Overall, remember that clarity is more important than creativity with resumes now, unless you’re in design. As a rule of thumb, create two versions of your document — one for the ATS, and one for the hiring manager who will use real eyeballs on the resume during interviews. I recommend starting with the ATS version, as it’s often easier to translate that version into more human-centric language and add style to the existing ATS framework. The “human” version can be more flexible to accommodate the cultural quirks and expectations specific companies and industries might have.
[Transcript summary]
Good morning, afternoon, or evening, everybody. I’m Wanda Thibodeaux of takingdictation.com, and as a copywriter and editor, we need to talk resumes.
Now, we all know that the job market, it’s pretty tough out there. So, you really need to make sure that your resume is spot on when you are putting in your applications. But the big question is, how do you do that? Like, what should it look like? What should you include?
And what I really want to communicate to you today is that all of the old school ways of doing a resume, forget them, because all of those things are really based on visual aspects. So, for example, you’ve got your bullet points, you’ve got your headers. All of that has kind of gone by the wayside. All of the templates that are out there, you make it look pretty, you use your color, your logos, whatever you’ve got, you can forget all that. And the reason is because now we have the Applicant Tracking Systems. So, we have these technology tools that are basically using AI to read the resumes for you, or for the hiring managers.
So, what that means is that these tools can read entire resumes even if their page is long, pages and pages, in seconds. They are not concerned with how your resume looks. They are concerned with what is on the resume in terms of meaning and whether it is a good match for that job.
So, the biggest thing is, make sure that your resume is clean, that you are making sure that the words, the keywords for the job description actually match what you put on the the resume. But again, they are not just looking for keywords. They are looking for contextual meaning. AI has gotten good enough that it can tell whether or not you’re just keyword stuffing. So, look through your resume and say, “Does this actually make sense to a human being?” Make sure that you are quantifying where you can. Those big things will help you right away.
Take care, everybody. Bye.