How To Make A Resume

Because of the volume of resumes employers receive, most of them now use some kind of resume tracking or applicant tracking system. This automates many of the tasks necessary for tracking candidates, and also makes it possible for an employer to find a resume they received months or years later. As a result of the technologies used, its important to keep your resume in a certain format that will be correctly read and interpreted by the systems. This used to be referred to as a “scannable” resume because of the hardware that used to scan paper resumes into the computer. Now, career websites and resumes received via email are "parsed" and stored in a database.

Once your resume is stored electronically, employers use keywords to match the stored resumes with their open positions. In order to find the resumes, employers (and recruiters) use keyword searches, usually a boolean search.

Because of the technologies involved in parsing the resume, it is important to keep the format of your resume very simple and somewhat plain. This means that you should generally avoid fancy fonts, graphics and and other "special effects" that don’t always make it through the technologies correctly, at least for your electronic resume (you might want a more elaborate version to hand out at job fairs, but it really isn't necessary). A resume that is not formatted correctly won’t appear in a search for matching keywords, which greatly reduces your chances of landing interviews. I have seen some resumes come through with "gibberish" as a result of the writer trying to use charts or pictures on their resume.