You résumé should be written for a human audience, but increasingly, a human will not even see it unless it passes the filters of Applicant (ATS) and Résumé (RTS) Tracking Systems.
How do you ensure your résumé makes it to the top of the stack? By remaining aware of advances in recruiting technology and knowing how these systems work when constructing your résumé.
Employers use this technology to reduce the time and cost of identifying suitable candidates to fill positions. Large companies and recruiters receive hundreds of résumés daily and using these screening programs allows many applicants to be sorted in a short amount of time.
These systems are becoming more sophisticated every day and the new résumé scanners are configured to read keywords and phrases in context: how relevant and related the keyword is as well as well as how recent that skill was acquired and/or used. This is in response to, among other things, the keyword dense “core competency” section of a résumé, an element incorporated to beat early tracking systems. A list of keywords is no longer going to cut it.
While listing keywords out of context is no longer recommended, they are still critical and must be incorporated into your résumé, and in a meaningful way. A great source of keywords is the description of the position to which you are tailoring your resume. (Don’t forget to put them in your cover letter too!)
