Resume Lab · Get You Employed

How applicant tracking systems and automated graders read your resume

Exact keywords win. Recruiters search their system for the literal nouns in the posting, so mirror its exact phrasing in your skills and your bullets. Around 60% of the hard skills it names should appear on the page word for word.
Standard skeleton. Headings named Summary / Experience / Education / Skills & Certifications, reverse-chronological, consistent dates (Sept 2024 – Sept 2025). Parsers key on these.
Nothing decorative. Tables, text boxes, icons, photos, and content in headers/footers get dropped or scrambled. Multi-column skill lists can shuffle reading order in extracted text — if a specific ATS chokes, flatten to one column.
File format. A text-layer PDF (the ⬇ PDF button here) or .docx. Never a scanned/image PDF. Name it Your-Name-Resume-Company.pdf.
What auto-graders score (and what the Grade button mirrors): verb-led bullets, share of bullets with numbers, one tight page, seniority keywords, no first-person.
Never white-text keyword stuffing — flagged automatically and reads as fraud.

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