How to Create an ATS-Friendly Resume for Today's Job Market (2024)

let's set something straight writing a perfectly crafted detailed and yet concise resume takes a lot of time and after putting so much work into your resume and applying to all the jobs that interest you you're met with a big hard rejection which oftentimes can leave us feeling stumped well don't worry because I got your back my name is Priscilla and I am a team member here at Job scan and today we're going to be talking about how to create a resume for today's job market that is not only ATS friendly but will also help you

land more job interviews but first we gotta talk about the basics what is an ATS if you watch our videos before you're probably familiar with all things applicant tracking system but if you're new here I'll give you a rundown of the basics so ATS is short for applicant tracking system which is a system that's used by 98 of Fortune 500 companies to scan and parse a resume and help recruiters sort and filter through these resumes in a faster and more efficient way in a survey of over 2 000 HR Executives conducted by Harvard Business School

and Accenture more than 90 percent of employers use a system like an ATS to initially filter and rank potential middle skills and high skills candidates and according to to the report that means that a recruiter may never see the candidate's application even though they fit all the requirements needed for that job but don't worry there is something you can do about it find the job title you're interested in and put that in your resume headline your resume headlines should be at the very top of your resume just under your name and your contact information and

the purpose of this is to call attention to your value as a candidate your headline should be brief attention grabbing and most importantly relevant to the job that you're applying for and here's an example if you're applying to a job with the title of this then that means that your headline should look a little something like this that way if a recruiter searches for that specific job title in the ATS your resume will be one of the ones that shows up find relevant skills and add them to your resume when a recruiter is searching for

a candidate they are not only searching for job titles but they might also look for keywords or skills that appear in the job description a really easy way to figure out what skills or keywords from the job description to include in your resume is by scanning your resume in our free ATS resume scanner tool so let's walk through an example together first let's upload my computer lead a resume into a resume scanner tool you can either upload a file or paste in the text from your resume next you're going to want to copy and paste

a job description into the box below but for the purpose of this example I'm going to select one of the sample roles on the right our tool will then give you a match rate for that specific job description in the top left corner you want to aim for about a 75 for your match rate so let's take a look at the hard skills portion to up our score it looks like SEO is mentioned in the job description twice but zero times in my resume this is a key indicator that I should be including that skill

in my resume and so when you figure out what skills and keywords to mention in your resume it's important to list these out in your skills section on your resume but also include these skills and keywords in your work history and show how you made a measurable impact within your role with the help of these skills and here's some key things to remember you want to use the same language that is in the job description on your resume as well as try not to over stuff your resume with keywords because it can look like you're

trying to gain the system and can also make your resume hard to read and hard to understand and the last and final step is to make sure your resume is easy to scan now that you have all the necessary information to include on your resume we don't want this information to be overlooked due to simple formatting mistakes so since a machine is going to be scanning and parsing your resume there are a number of key formatting tips to follow to make sure nothing gets missed on accident here are some things to check for when it

comes to formatting make sure to use a standard font some ats's change the non-standard font into a standard font so your unique fonts won't be seen anyways saving the file as either a PDF or a Word document when we tested the most popular ATS is we found that these two file types were the most easy to scan and parse formatting your dates correctly so this is important because atss can be used to filter candidates by years of experience so that's why your work history and your dates need to be easily understood and read by the

system and in our resume scanner tool you can can easily check for all of these things under the formatting portion of your match report to make sure nothing gets overlooked when your resume is scanned or parsed if you are looking for a completely free Resume Builder that helps you build out your resume in just six easy steps we have that tool available Linked In Our description below or if you just simply want a plug and play template that gives a description on what to include in each section be sure to check out our free resume

templates that I will also link down in the description below and again these tools are completely free for you to use and to help you on your job search so check out our description for all the links to the tools and be sure to leave a comment if you want a separate video where we dive deeper into the different types of resume formats and how to use our Resume Builder and that is all for this video if you follow these easy steps you'll have an award-winning resume that is not only going to get you more

interviews but also help you land the job of your dreams and if you found this video helpful be sure to leave us a big thumbs up and leave a comment down below we would love to hear from you guys and don't forget to subscribe for more job searching tips we wish you the best of luck on your job search and I will see you next time bye