Resume advice that is actually current.

What an applicant tracking system actually does

There is a whole industry built on making you afraid of the robot. Here is the honest version.

An applicant tracking system is a database. When you apply, it takes your file, tries to pull structured information out of it, names, dates, employers, titles, skills, and stores that alongside the original document. Later, a human searches that database, filters it, and reads what comes back.

One more thing worth knowing: the parser does not reward you for stuffing keywords. A human is reading the result. A block of thirty comma separated buzzwords at the bottom of page two reads exactly like what it is, and it makes me trust the rest of the document less.

The formatting that quietly breaks it

This is where most damage happens, and it is invisible to you. Your resume looks beautiful on your screen and arrives as scrambled text on mine. The offenders, in order of how often I see them:

• Multiple columns. The single biggest one. A two column layout with your skills in a sidebar frequently parses as interleaved nonsense, your job titles shuffled in with your software list. If you take one thing from this guide, make your resume a single column top to bottom.
• Tables. Same problem. Invisible table borders are still a table.
• Text boxes and shapes. Many parsers do not read inside them at all. Your contact information in a floating box can disappear entirely.
• Headers and footers. Do not put your name, phone, or email in the document header. It is the most commonly dropped region of the whole file.
• Icons instead of labels. A little envelope glyph next to your email is a picture. It carries no text. Same with phone handsets, pins, and the LinkedIn logo.
• A scanned or image based PDF. If you printed it, signed it, and scanned it, or exported it as an image, it has no text layer. It is a photograph of a resume. It parses as nothing at all.
• Graphic skill ratings. Five filled circles out of five next to Excel communicates nothing to a parser and, honestly, nothing to me either. I do not know what your four out of five means. Tell me you build pivot tables and XLOOKUPs.
• Creative section headings. Call it Experience or Work Experience, Education, Skills. Not My Journey. Parsers look for the ordinary words, and so do I.
• Dates only as years. Use month and year, like Mar 2021 – Aug 2024. Year only reads as if you are hiding a gap, and when you are not hiding anything that is a terrible impression to give for free.

Want to test your own file in thirty seconds? Open the PDF, hit select all, copy, and paste it into a blank plain text document or an email body. What you see is roughly what the parser sees. If your name is missing, if the order is scrambled, if your skills are jammed inside your job history, that is a real problem and it is happening on every application you send.

The six second read

The six second figure gets thrown around loosely, but the behavior behind it is real. On a first pass I am not reading your resume. I am answering four questions as fast as I can:

1. What is this person doing right now, and is it adjacent to my opening? Most recent title and employer.
2. How long have they been doing it? Dates, and whether they move every eleven months.
3. Have they touched the specific thing this job needs? For an accounting seat that might be cash application. For an inside sales seat, quoting. For an admin seat, scheduling across multiple calendars.
4. Are they in range geographically and financially? City and state, and whether their history suggests my range is a pay cut.

Everything structural about your resume should make those four answers findable without scrolling. If I have to hunt, I am already less interested, and I have forty more to get through today.

How to write a bullet that survives

Most bullets are job descriptions. They describe the duties a person in that chair would have. That tells me nothing about you, because the next forty resumes say the same words.

A bullet that works has three parts: what you did, at what scale, and what came of it. Scale is the part people skip, and it is the part that separates you from everyone else with the same title.

Notice what the strong version does not do. It does not inflate. It says roughly and about, because you are going to be asked about these numbers in the interview and you need to be able to stand behind them comfortably. Approximate and honest beats precise and invented every single time.

How many bullets per job? Three to six for your current and most recent role. Two or three for the one before. One or two for anything more than about ten years back. Nobody needs six bullets about the job you left in 2011.

Numbers when you do not have numbers

"But I do not have metrics, I am not in sales." Almost everyone has scale, they just do not think of it as a number. Pick from these:

• Volume. Invoices a week. Calls a day. Orders processed. Files closed. Candidates screened.
• Size of what you touched. Dollar value of the AR portfolio. Headcount you supported. Number of locations, accounts, or entities.
• People. How many you trained. How many departments you were the single point of contact for. Reported to how many attorneys or managers.
• Frequency and deadline. Monthly close in how many days. Weekly, daily, quarterly. Payroll for how many employees on what cycle.
• Systems, named. Not "ERP experience." The actual product name and what you did in it.
• Change you caused. Something got faster, cleaner, cheaper, or stopped breaking. Even a rough before and after is worth putting down.

The top third of page one

This is the most valuable real estate you own. Four things belong there and nothing else.

1. Your name, in the body of the document, not the header.
2. City, state, and ZIP. Not your street address. Employers here genuinely care about commute, and a ZIP tells me whether West Seneca is a fifteen minute drive or a fifty minute one. Skip it entirely and I have to guess, and sometimes I guess wrong.
3. Phone and email as plain text. Use a professional email address. An aol or hotmail address does not disqualify you with me, but an address like partygirl716 genuinely will make a hiring manager pause.
4. A three line summary, only if it is targeted. This is optional. A good one is a gift. A generic one is worse than nothing.

And delete the word Objective. It has been dead for fifteen years. If you have something useful to say, it is a summary. If you do not, the space is better spent on your most recent job.

The skills section, done right

A skills section should be a short, scannable, specific list of things you can be tested on. Systems, software, certifications, licenses, languages. That is it.

What does not belong there: communication, teamwork, problem solving, leadership, attention to detail, hard working. Nobody in the history of resumes has listed poor communication. These words cost you lines and buy you nothing. If you are genuinely good with people, prove it in a bullet about a thing you did with people.

Name your systems exactly. In accounting that means the actual ERP: Dynamics NAV, Navision, Business Central, SAP, Oracle, Sage, NetSuite, QuickBooks. In legal support it means the actual platform. For Excel, be honest and be specific: pivot tables, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, Power Query tells me your real level. "Advanced Excel" tells me you think you are good at Excel, and roughly half the people who write it cannot build a pivot table.

Length, file format, and file name

What to cut today

• "References available upon request." Of course they are. It is assumed. You just spent a line saying nothing.
• Your street address. City, state, ZIP is right. Full street address is a privacy exposure with no upside.
• High school, if you have any college or a degree. If you do not have a degree, list high school or your GED plainly and move on. For a lot of the roles I fill, including ones paying in the fifties and sixties, a degree is preferred and not required. Do not talk yourself out of applying.
• Jobs from more than about fifteen to twenty years ago, unless directly relevant. You can compress them into one line: Earlier experience: administrative and customer service roles, 2003–2009.
• Adjective piles. Covered above. They are filler.
• Every duty you have ever performed. A resume is an argument, not an inventory.
• Your graduation year, if you are concerned about age bias. This is a legitimate strategy. Age discrimination is illegal in New York and it still happens. List the degree and the school without the year. I do not need it, and a good recruiter will not ask you for it.

Gaps and short stints

Two pieces of good news here.

First, gaps stopped being disqualifying somewhere around 2020. Between the pandemic, caregiving, layoffs, and plain burnout, nearly everyone's timeline has a hole in it. What still hurts you is an unexplained gap, because in the absence of an explanation the reader invents one, and the invented one is always worse than the truth. Put a single line where the gap is: Family caregiving, Jan 2023 – Nov 2023. Position eliminated in reduction in force. Completed accounting coursework at ECC. Done. It is no longer a question mark.

Second, a short stint is survivable if you name it. Contract, temp, seasonal, a company that closed, a role that was misrepresented to you when you took it. Write (contract) or (temporary assignment) right next to the title and the concern evaporates. What raises a real flag is three consecutive unexplained eleven month jobs, because the employers I recruit for are small, a bad hire genuinely hurts them, and they are looking for evidence you will still be there in two years.

If that pattern is your history and there is a reason for it, tell your recruiter the reason on the phone. I would much rather be able to explain it to a hiring manager than have them discover it and draw a conclusion I cannot correct.

Tailoring without rewriting everything

You do not need a different resume for every job. That is unsustainable advice and it is why people stop tailoring at all. Do this instead, it takes about ten minutes:

1. Read the posting and pull the nouns. Not the fluff about being a team player. The concrete things: cash application, lockbox, Business Central, month end close, audit schedules, commercial collections.
2. Find where you have actually done each one and make sure that exact word appears in your bullets. If the posting says cash application and your resume says posting payments, make it say cash application, because that is what the posting says and that is what someone will search for.
3. Reorder the bullets in your most recent role so the ones matching the posting are first. That is usually the entire edit, and it is the highest leverage ten minutes in your job search.
4. Update your summary's last line to name the target. Thirty seconds.

Never claim a system you have not touched. It is the fastest way to be caught, either in a screening call or three weeks into the job, and in a market this small being caught follows you around.

The ten minute resume review

Open your resume and go down this list honestly.

• One column, top to bottom. No tables, text boxes, or sidebars.
• Name, city, state, ZIP, phone, email in the document body, not the header.
• Every job has month and year for start and end.
• Most recent role has three to six bullets, and at least three of them contain a number.
• Every system, software, and platform is named exactly, not described in categories.
• No adjective piles. No "references available upon request." No objective.
• Any gap over about four months has a one line explanation sitting in it.
• Any contract or temp role is labeled as contract or temp.
• File is a text based PDF named Firstname Lastname Resume.pdf.
• You did the select all, copy, paste test and it came out readable and in order.
• Somebody else proofread it. Not spellcheck. A person. Spellcheck does not catch manger for manager, and I see that one constantly.

This guide is general information for job seekers, not legal advice. New York employment law changes, and how a rule applies depends on your specific situation. If you believe an employer has broken the law in how it treated you, talk to the New York State Department of Labor or an employment attorney.