How to Format Resumes & Pass the ATS Software (Video)

PART OF THE WEEKEND UPDATE SERIES: Celebrity Headhunter Brian Daniel explains how resumes should be formatted to beat the ATS system to get decision-makers to view your submission. 

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hey team. So, I got an email from a job seeker. She said, please look at my resume. Look at my resume. So, I said, okay.
Send it over. Take a look at it. And so, I asked her, I said on a scale of 1 to 10, Where do you think you are? 10 is a perfect resume. She said, well... I think it's pretty good. I think it's like an eight or a nine. I said, are there any mistakes on it?
She said no. I said, I found 22 mistakes. I said, did you have a friend look at it? And she said, yeah. I said there are 22 mistakes. I said, you have misspellings.

I said, you have improper use of homophones, typos... incorrect use of verb tenses, and I could keep going. I said, and that is not the least of your problems. The other problem that you have is that you have text boxes. You made your resume all artsy, right? Yeah. I want to color. I wanted to look great and stand out. I said no. You have text boxes. And what happens is when you have a text box. It prevents the ATS software from scanning your resume and getting the
information off of it that it needs.

She goes, really? I said, yep, and you have another problem. It's a big resume sin. You have an objective statement.
I said those are 80s -- 1970s. We don't use those anymore. She said, why? I said, because you're telling the employer what you want. They don't care... so they got a thousand resumes for that job. They don't care what you want. They care what they want. What am I supposed to do instead? I said, you have a summary of qualifications.

You are supposed to take...  You study... You study in a very deep way... You study the job description. When you study the job description you pull keywords off of the job description and you put on your resume It's called SEO: search engine optimization. You have to optimize your resume. So, if you see skills that you know how to do, you put that right at the top of the resume because if you passed the ATS, if you're one of the lucky people that passed the ATS, and then you only have 7 seconds when a human looks at your resume -- seven seconds.

They don't want to read your whole resume to see if you have what they need. It's got if you're right on the top of the resume, that's prime real estate. She said, oh, okay. Well, I'll get to work. It said, everything you need, every single thing that you need to learn how to beat ATS, how to format your resume... It's all on my website for free. Good luck.

By Brian Daniel