You’ve scoured through all your records, assembled your career highlights, emphasized your educational and work experience and are now confident that when you post this resume the employers are going to digitally flock to you. After all, this is the ticket to get you your new dream job. WRONG! The Job Coach Resumes are not intended to get you jobs, just interviews.

But wait, you’ve overlooked the most important point and you are probably not even aware of it. It’s hardly ever mentioned and not taught in most business schools. The truth is there is a good chance that a human will never even look at your resume.

In the times that we live in, most companies receive hundreds of resumes for each position made available. Gone are the days when an assistant would scour through stacks of resumes to find that oh so perfect applicant for the boss to call in for an interview. Today, resumes are digitally scanned looking for certain key ingredients. If your resume is not optimized to be seen by the scanners, you and your employment opportunity remained buried under the proverbial pile! If you ever want to be found you must understand how to write a scanable electronic resume.

Resumes that are posted online and resumes that are scanned are different from regular paper resumes in three important ways:

1. Format
2. Keywords
3. Font/Typesets

Format

• Left justified. Don’t center or indent lines.
• Avoid using vertical and horizontal lines
• Avoid using graphics, or boxes

Keywords

Keywords are specific words or phrases that employers use to identify the candidates they want to interview. The software most companies use to scan resumes, scans based on keywords – much the way you use keywords to search for information on the internet. If you don’t have the right keywords in your resume, employers won’t be able to find you. But how do you know which keywords to include? Three places to look for the appropriate keywords are the following:

• The specific job description or job ad for the job you’re applying for
• Recent online or newspaper ads for similar jobs
• Ask other job seekers and people currently employed in your field

Rick Gillis, in his book Really Useful Job Search Tactics provides 11 excellent ideas for identifying and embedding keywords in your Scanable Electronic Resume. Get his book; it will definitely help you in your resume prep.

Font / Typesets

Employers “scan” resumes to transfer them from a paper format to an electronic format for easy storage and review. Unfortunately, scanning software is not infallible and in some cases, it is easily confused. This means that you need to keep Scanable Electronic versions of your resume and any “hard copies” that may be scanned, as simple as possible. Following are rules to remember when translating resumes to Scanable Electronic formats.

• No tabs
• Use 10 to 12 point fonts
• Avoid two-column formats
• No parentheses or brackets
• Place your name and contact phone number or email on each page
• Acceptable font types – Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier
• Avoid italics, underlining, and shading
• Opinions on Bolding and using UPPERCASE characters are split. If in doubt, don’t use them.

Well, there you have it, the most important thing that most people never do in preparing their resume for online submission. If you’re going to take the time to put together that killer resume, extend the extra effort and get the digital side of your house in order. Without it, no one is ever going to find you.

Good luck on that dream job!

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