The ultimate goal of applying to jobs and moving forward as a candidate is to get your resume seen. However, in a competitive market, that task can feel nearly insurmountable. You know you’re qualified, and your experience and accomplishments are aligned with what the job description requests, yet those calls for interviews are few and far between.
Not only is this entire process frustrating, but it can also reduce your self-confidence.
Part of the issue with getting your resume seen is that today’s review process often includes several steps that must be traversed prior to it landing in the hands of a decision maker. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are an integral component of the process, helping employers organize and manage applications. They also assist recruiters to identify candidates whose backgrounds align with the position to which they’ve applied. And it doesn’t help that there’s significant confusion about how ATSs factor into the job search.
What’s important to remember is that your resume has two simple jobs:
- It needs to get your name through ATS.
- It helps recruiters and hiring managers see how you’re qualified.
The good thing is that these two jobs are easily achieved with one well-crafted resume. No, that doesn’t mean you need to stuff your resume with keywords or do anything nefarious. Rather, a resume that incorporates the language of the job description while positioning you as a great candidate is what will improve your chances of securing calls for interviews.
First, Align Your Resume with the Job Description
One of the easiest and best ways to make your resume more relevant to a particular position is to study the job description. This may sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly common for job seekers to send essentially the same resume to every position they find. They may have one excellent master resume and assume that because it accurately represents their experience, it should work equally well for every employer.
Sometimes, it can, but more frequently, that base is just not enough. Every position has different priorities. Even two jobs with the same title can emphasize completely different skills, responsibilities, and outcomes.
Read the job description carefully and look for the language the employer uses to describe what they need.
- What skills appear repeatedly?
- Which qualifications are emphasized?
- What technologies, methodologies, certifications, or areas of expertise are mentioned?
- What problems does the organization appear to be trying to solve?
Then look at your own experience to identify where the employer’s needs overlap with your skills and accomplishments. That overlap is where your resume should focus.
Use Keywords Strategically
Keywords on your resume enable ATSs to find it and match it to the position, but more isn’t necessarily better. If a job description mentions project management, stakeholder engagement, budget management, and Agile methodology, for example, you don’t need to repeat those terms 15 times throughout your resume. Instead, use the terminology where it accurately describes your experience.
- If you led a $4 million technology implementation using Agile methodology, say so.
- If you managed stakeholders across five business units, explain what you accomplished.
- If you have experience managing project budgets, quantify the scope when possible.
In other words, use the language because it describes your experience—not because you’re trying to trick a system. This also gives the human reader something valuable: context. A list of keywords tells someone what you know; an accomplishment tells them what you did with it.
Don’t Turn Your Resume into a Design Project
When your aim is to get your resume seen, you may be inclined to “design” it to help it stand out. While there are certainly ways you can make your document more visually appealing, there are also some components that don’t play well with ATS. Aspects you’ll want to avoid include:
- Tables
- Charts
- Graphs
- Text boxes
- Skill bars
- Multiple colors or fonts
- Headers and footers
- Multiple columns
Overly designed resumes may look good, but in some ATSs, they don’t parse cleanly. Even when they do, unnecessary design elements can make it harder for a recruiter to quickly identify the information that matters.
What recruiters are really looking for is content. Your focus when writing your resume should be on clearly communicating your value. For most professionals, a clean, straightforward format with recognizable section headings, consistent formatting, and readable text is a much safer approach. Keep the focus on your experience, accomplishments, skills, and qualifications rather than making the document itself the star.
Make Your Accomplishments Easy to Find
A recruiter reviewing resumes doesn’t usually have time to read every word. That means your qualifications and accomplishments need to be easy to spot. Compare these two statements:
- Responsible for managing a team of 12 employees and overseeing departmental operations.
- Reduced annual operating costs $1.2M, while maintaining service levels, through proactive communication and training with 12-person operations team.
The second statement gives the reader something to notice. It tells them what you did, the scope of your responsibility, and the result. That’s what you want to highlight throughout your resume.
Look for opportunities to quantify your impact:
- Revenue generated
- Costs reduced
- Time saved
- Customers gained or retained
- Projects completed
- Teams led
- Budgets managed
- Processes improved
- Performance increased
Not every accomplishment can be expressed with a dollar figure or percentage, and that’s fine. The goal isn’t to manufacture numbers; it’s to make the value of your work apparent.
Put the Right Information Where People Will See It
Your most relevant qualifications shouldn’t be buried on page two. If the job description emphasizes strategic planning, for example, and strategic planning is one of your strengths, make that connection early in the document. Your summary, most recent experience, and accomplishments should quickly establish how your experience aligns with the opportunity.
This doesn’t mean cramming everything into the top third of the resume, but you do want to be intentional about what deserves prominence.
Think of your resume as a guided tour. You want the reader to arrive at the important parts without having to hunt for them. Format, along with content, helps this to happen quickly and easily.
Tailor Your Resume for the Specific Opportunity
If you come away with nothing else to help get your resume seen, remember this:
Your resume should be tailored to the job you’re pursuing.
That doesn’t mean rewriting your entire career history every time you apply. If you have a strong base resume, all you’ll need to do is rework your title and summary and then review your experience to ensure you’re emphasizing how you fit with the employer’s needs.
Let’s say you’re a marketing executive who has experience in brand strategy, demand generation, communications, and product marketing. If you apply for a role focused heavily on demand generation, your resume should make that experience prominent.
Then you apply for a role focused on corporate communications. It’s still in marketing, but the emphasis has changed. Your resume should change appropriately.
This approach is not inauthentic. It recognizes that your career has multiple dimensions, and as you apply to different roles, you’re choosing the ones that are most relevant to the conversation you’re trying to have.
Your resume represents your career. Your tailored resume represents your fit for this particular opportunity.
Don’t Use a One-Size-Fits-All Resume
Having a master resume is absolutely worthwhile. It gives you a comprehensive record of your experience and accomplishments from which you can build targeted versions. But your master resume isn’t necessarily the document you should send when you apply.
When you find a position you want, highlight the information that’s most relevant to that employer.
- Adjust your summary.
- Review your experience and include things you’ve done that are requested in the JD.
- Bring the most applicable accomplishments forward.
- Incorporate relevant terminology from the job description.
The result should still accurately represent your career. It should simply make it much easier for the employer to see why your experience matters to them.
Remember Who Ultimately Makes the Decision
It’s easy to become overly focused on ATS when you’re searching for a job, particularly because there is so much misinformation about how these systems work. An ATS is a tool employers use to manage applications and help organize information. It isn’t the hiring manager.
People make hiring decisions. That means you shouldn’t create a resume that reads like it was written for a computer. Use standard terminology where appropriate. Make sure your qualifications are easy to identify. Keep your formatting clean. But then go one step further and make the document compelling to the person who ultimately decides whether you’re worth a conversation.
Remember that you want to have the right information on your resume so ATSs can find it—and you want to highlight your qualifications and accomplishments, so a recruiter is intrigued and wants to learn more.
Think Beyond the Resume
Getting your resume seen is important, but your resume isn’t the only way to get noticed. Networking, referrals, LinkedIn, recruiters, professional associations, and direct outreach can all create opportunities to get your name in front of the right people.
At Transition Solutions, we encourage job seekers to leverage various avenues as part of their job search, rather than relying solely on submitting applications. Yes, you need a resume, but if someone in your network refers you to a hiring manager, your resume may arrive with context that an online application doesn’t provide. And if a recruiter contacts you directly, the conversation may begin before your resume is even reviewed.
Your resume matters, but it shouldn’t be doing all the work.
The Goal Isn’t to Beat the ATS
There are plenty of articles promising to help you “beat” an applicant tracking system. That’s the wrong mindset. You’re not trying to outsmart technology. You’re aiming to ensure your qualifications can be understood by the systems employers use to organize applications—and then make it easy for a recruiter or hiring manager to see your value.
That means using relevant language naturally, keeping your formatting clean, tailoring your resume to the opportunity, and making your accomplishments impossible to miss. Most importantly, remember that the objective isn’t simply to get your resume through a system. The objective is to get someone interested enough to keep reading.
Your resume doesn’t have to beat the ATS. It has to make it through the ATS—and persuade a human being to keep reading. That’s where the real opportunity begins.
About Transition Solutions
For more than 35 years, Transition Solutions has helped individuals navigate career change through personalized coaching, innovative technology, and practical strategies for today’s job market. Our experienced career consultants help clients develop targeted resumes, strengthen their professional brands, and build job-search strategies designed to move their careers forward.
To learn more about our services, visit www.transitionsolutions.com, call 888-424-0003, or email info@transitionsolutions.com.
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