Resume best practices

These days, many recruiters use machine readers or parsers to make sense of your resume, and quite often resumes that cannot be read by a machine are simply discarded. Our resume parser is very advanced, but occasionally we cannot obtain all the information we require. Please find below some guidelines on how best to structure your resume. Sometimes the "prettiest" resumes cause issues. Overall, it’s best to keep your resume simple so it can be understood by a machine

JPGs PNGs etc cannot be read by our system. Use clear text. If your resume contains a photo that’s fine, so long as the resume description is in text

Each section of the CV should have a clear and unambiguous heading, e.g. Personal, Employment, Education, Skills, References, Summary, Hobbies etc… Avoid ambiguous headings such as "Post History" or "Track record to date"

Any dates used for current or previous employment should be clear. Ideally like "2018-2019" or "November 2018 to present"

Avoid putting columns or tables in your resume. The resume should ideally be straightforward text and read from top to bottom

Ideally use MS Word or an open source equivalent. Whilst we can handle PDFs, these sometimes have weird formatting issues that can cause inaccuracies

We can handle headers and footers in documents but sometimes the repetition of these cause issues

Our system recognises hundreds of thousands of roles, but a job title of e.g. "Management Guru" is plainly silly. Try to be as specific as possible, e.g. instead of "manager" put "sales manager" or "store manager" etc…

Entering "Springfield" as your location causes us a headache, as we’ve no idea which of the 33 Springfield’s you are in. We’ll make a best guess, but it’s much better if you enter e.g. "Springfield, IL"