This piece originally appeared on Uncubed.com.
Resume 2.0
While your resume probably hasn’t changed much in the past few years, HR pros – and the bots they use – have drastically altered how they assess that seemingly simple one-sheet.
To help weed through applicants, many recruiters use filtering and parsing software that eliminates applicants who don’t match a job description. But what if you’ve used different language than the job posting, or have a whimsical resume design that doesn’t compute for these so-called resume bots?
We’ve gathered some great tech and tools to help you build a resume that will be loved by both robots and recruiters alike.
Build Your Resume
Although visual resumes were all the rage a few years ago, experts believe a straightforward design is best to get past the bots.
As Ash Hogan, Intent Media’s Director of Global Talent Acquisition, teaches in our Uncubed class The First 5 Things a Recruiter Sees on Your Resume, “Now is not the time to show your design skills. Color-on-color is hard to read and extremely distracting. If your resume gives me a headache, then I’m putting it aside for another time.”
As its name suggests, Standard Resume is a simple web tool to create an online and offline resume. You plug in your details, and the formatting is done for you.
Of course, a resume is more than just a set of company names and dates. Resume Genius helps you figure out what to write. “Our online software generates thousands of perfectly written bullet points for you to choose from, covering all industries,” according to their site. You can also have your resume given a once over by a “Certified Resume Expert” (for a fee).
Kickresume allows you to get a little creative with the look of your resume, but the company says their designs are approved by recruiters. Kickresume is on the freemium model: basic templates are free, but for a fee they offer customization, cover letters, and grammar corrections.
For more on Resume Advice, watch this Fortune video:
Beat the Bots
Now that you’ve gotten the structure of your resume down, you should fine tune and optimize it. “We have researched the top systems used by thousands of companies, and built our algorithm based on the common patterns among them,” announcesJobscan’s website. To find out if your resume matches what the HR team is looking for, paste your resume and the job description side-by-side; Jobscan will let you know what keywords you’re missing.
You’ve heard it before: You should change your resume for each job you’re applying for. Resunate allows you to build your resume with a specific job listing (and its keyword hunting bots) in mind. Here you copy and paste the resume and job description, and your resume is given a score based on how well your resume matches the job the employer is trying to fill. Change your resume and watch your score go up.
Be the Bots
If you can’t beat the bots, join ’em, right? When Esther Crawford lost her startup job, she created a chatbot that speaks to hiring managers on her behalf. The EsterBot can answer questions about work experience, interests, and skills.
“I figured a bot could step in at this stage of the recruitment process because bots can easily answer recurring questions (let’s face it: recruiters all basically ask the same things),” Crawford wrote in a Medium post.
But rather than taking any of the three job offers Crawford received thanks to her bot, she has decided to help others make their own resume bot. She was recently accepted to Botcamp, a startup accelerator at Betaworks in New York.
A resume bot doesn’t mean it’s the end for traditional resumes, though, as Crawford told Venturebeat, “I don’t think of a resume bot as superseding or completely replacing a resume. I think of it as a more complete version of a resume.”
Back to the resume writing then.
