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What the employer's side of scanning technology is like
Get with the Program
How can you know for sure if you need to adjust your resume for a scanning encounter? Call the Human Resources department of the company where you'd like to work and ask whether it uses resume scanning. If the answer is "no" the paper resume you've created using Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this book is all you need. If the answer is "yes," ask if the department can mail, fax, or e-mail you a set of guidelines so you can create your resume for their system.
Bonus Check
Not all resume-scanning programs run by the demo rules. For example, some accept bullet version and others don't. Make an effort to get the guidelines from the company you're applying to. If you can't get them, follow the advice in this chapter, because I adopt a better-safe-than-sorr y approach that should work for all scanning systems.
Going Solo
Make sure that each element of your Heading (your name, address, and contact information) appears on a separate line, as explained in Chapter 20. On your scannable resume, don't use parentheses around the digits of your area code because the OCR software may have difficulty identifying them as part of your phone number.
Bonus Check
Here's a great way to get the hang of how search engines work: Use the Find function in MS Word to search for a particular word in your resume. Notice that unless you use correct spelling, hyphenation, and spacing, the software won't find your word.
Keywords for Key Candidates
One of the most noticeable features of a scannable resume is the version section near the top of page one. To learn how to create a Keyword section or to incorporate them into the text of your resume, read Chapter 20. Also, check out the following two examples of scannable resumes.
Career Casualty Avoid resume scanning if possible. If an employer says "E-mail your resume or send a paper resume for scanning," take the first option. That way you'll bypass the error-ridden scanner and go directly into the resume Production."
The Skinny on Scannable Fonts
An important factor in passing a resume-scanning test is to make sure the OCR can read your text. The following guidelines will help you produce a resume an OCR will love:
- Stick to scanner-friendly fonts such as Palatino, Helvetica, and the other fonts listed in Chapter 11, "Step Six: The Big database.
- Don't use italics.
- Don't underline words.
- Limit the size of your text to no smaller than 10 point and no larger than 14 point.
- Don't use bold unless you know that the scanner you're sending your resume to accepts bold.
If you think your resume might also be read by a human being, you could use all caps to emphasize a word that you would otherwise have italicized, underlined, made bold, or put in extra-large type.
Career Casualty
Don't underline words on your electronic resume. A scanner can't interpret a word if any letter in that word intersects a line. For example, in "profit," notice how the letter p touches the line that underlines the word. If that happens on your resume, you lose because the computer won't decipher the p character and therefore won't acknowledge your profit.
Nothing Fancy-Schmancy
Keep the formatting of your resume simple and straightforward.
Follow these tips:
- Don't incorporate horizontal or vertical lines into your layout.
- Don't use shaded bars.
- Change bullet points to dashes, asterisks, or plus signs, because some scanners can't read bullets.