Can Recruiters Read Your Resume?

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Can Recruiters Read Your Resume?

Res-U-Builder - a new solution for optimizing your resume for Canadian recruiters

In our digital world, more and more recruiters rely on software to digitally scan your resume and upload the text to their database. They don’t actually look at the resume. They look at the text after a digital scanner has separated your résumé’s text components and uploaded them to their recruiting database. If the scanning software can not determine where some your résumé’s text belongs it simply omits it.

The concern here is that vital parts of your resume may never make their way into the recruiting database you are sending it to, specially is you use typical resume formatted templates that have not taken resume database recognition into account or certain formatting techniques available with your word processing software (i.e. Word), columns, bold text underlining etc.

During a meeting, a recruiter explained this issue to me and introduced me to Res-U-Builder. He asked me if I had a digital copy of my resume. I logged on to a wireless network and e-mailed my resume to him. He then pulled the resume text into the popular recruiting software system his firm uses (I will refrain from mentioning the software brand here since I understand most recruiting software exhibit similar issues). The result was shocking and potentially devastating; the resume database’s recognition software had failed to recognize all of my work experience and therefore completely omitted my experience from my resume. So to a recruiter looking at my resume in their database, I was a candidate with zero experience. Obviously in this case a recruiter would likely move on to the next applicant’s resume for any mid to high level position. I couldn’t help but think about all of the seemingly talented job seekers I have spoken with who mentioned how tired they are of sending resumes over the Internet and never receiving any response.

So what is the solution?

I recommend following the steps outlined in the article Creating ASCII Files as a good start and if you don’t mind spending $29 for peace of mind a special resume builder tool called Res-U-Builder is available from JobHunterTools.com. Res-U-Builder is designed to assist you in creating your own resume from scratch or take your current resume document optimize it for Recruiter Database Recognition. Either way, you owe yourself the piece of mind that comes with knowing your resume text can be recognized if you are sending it to an employer or recruiter who is using recruiting software or resume database software with automated recognition upload software.

If your resumes text is not presented in a recognizable format the scanner will not know where in the database to allocate the text, it simply omits it.

Research indicates that 30% of the resume text formatting used by job seekers is not being recognized by the software that recruiters use to receive and review your resume. That’s why Res-U-Build has developed their robust resume builder and resume text format optimization tool.