OrderMyCareer
Resume Layout Mastery / ATS Mastery
It’s not about the having the right format for 2023 or perfect template. It’s about the readability and white space.
Resumes don't need "the right" template.
Or the right colors. Or the right formatting. Or the right style for that type of job. It’s about just having it formatted nicely. Recruiters/hirers just care that it’s readable, understandable, and preferably parse-able by their ATS systems.
All it needs is your info, a few sections, a few sentences per section, and clarity.
This example resume to the right is a great example of a clear, simple resume format, and it’s perfect for everyone.
(Except graphic designers. Those types need something “cooler looking”)
Helpful tip 1:
This is an example of only the format, the style. This is a fake resume, don’t worry about the wording.
Let's look at the sections.
1. Your name and contact info – this should always be at the very very top.
2. Profile (now usually called Objective or Executive Summary) – a statement about your overall experience OR what roles you are looking for.
3. Experience (also called Employment History) – the name of the company, role name, dates, and description of your skills from working there. This is where people see your skills.
4. Education – This can go above Experience if you are newly graduated and/or have little to no employment history.
Wait, what about a soft/hard skills list? Shouldn’t those go somewhere?
Nope.
That part is useless on all resumes and is mostly a reaction to the career consultant/recruiter realm that you need to list your skills on your resume – but gave no guidance or examples. Also the TRUE advice of “ATS systems need keywords” added to the idea but in a terrible way. From there, everyone followed suit. But – recruiters read those resumes…and skills without context are meaningless to them!
Writing things up!
- Open up an Word or PDF document.
- At the top, put your name, address, phone, and email.
- Under Objective, put a statement something like “Looking for a X or Y position in X or Y field.” Short and simple is fine!
- Under Experience, write your job title, company name, and dates employed. Hold off on putting your skills under them for the moment, we’re just setting up the basics here.
- Under Education, add the program name, the school name, and the month/year you graduated (or stopped schooling, you can write that you did not complete yet, or if you’re still in school, put your start date “-current”)
Skill Placement
Getting the RIGHT skills for the job is the most important part of your resume. Format be damned. Where you worked be damned. Literally everything else matters exactly 10% tops, the skills you list are the other 90%.
Look at the job you’re going for and your skills list. What skills do you already have? Go to your finished skills list.
Copy and paste those skills directly under the job you gained them from. Literally just directly copy and paste for now!
Matching Jobs for the ATS
This is how to tweak the wording as described earlier in the course, to match the job.
“Beating the ATS” is a misnomer, and assumes that you have to write your resume for the ATS only.
Applicant Tracker Systems only sort.
They are like an excel document set up for recruiters.
There’s not much you have to do to “beat the ATS”. Just match as much of your resume to the job advertisement’s language! From there, it places you “further up the list” but will always put you on the list somewhere. Recruiters don’t just look at the top 10, they go through them all!
For example: if you had “Led a team” and the role you want has “direct teams” as a job duty, then tweak your skill and change “led” to “directed”. Yes ATSes are able to tell that “direct and directed” are the same words. Along with direct-able, direction, and directly.
But they’re not perfect – and recruiters know it. So they go through them all. Always.
Lastly, do no more than 6-7 bullet points under each job…unless you’ve had a very very long history of growth under that job. You may need to move things around a bit, that’s ok! If you have already put one similar skill in one area, no need to put it other places.
Mention it once, maybe mention it twice, but do not mention it three times!
(No ATS auto rejects you. That’s a recruiter working at night, or on a different time zone, since many recruiters can work 100% remote they may be in Germany, the Philippines, or Japan….that’s why when you get a rejection at 12am. Also, if you do get auto-rejected, it’s because you didn’t fit one of the few foundational questions in the system – usually that part before where you submit your resume which asks you if you can work PT/FT, etc.)
Format your resume
Formatting is SO easy!
It just means make it look uniform and nice looking. Yes, sometimes Word vs other office programs will mess things up – but recruiters know about it and kinda assume there will be issues when they see a resume. They are human, and mistakes from computers are easily identifiable from human misspellings.
For formatting success – just check your ABCs.
- Align things like the names and dates of your jobs so they all are in the same places for each job you listed.
- Bullet points are all aligned the same for each job.
- Capitalizing is done for sentences, and punctuation is all the same, all the way down.
Bad Resume:
Click on this resume to see a bad resume in action
Another bad resume in action
Good resume:
Click on this resume to see a fixed resume that got this person 8 job interviews immediately (in 5 days!)
Her fixed resume, which landed her 3 specialized jobs offers in 3 months! (the 3rd job was the charm)
Before you click onwards,
want to see what your CAMP call will be like?
Here’s a few past client’s calls! (It used to be called Skillseeker call)