What is ATS Friendly Resumes and How can we Create it?

What is ATS?

Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are software applications which collect, sort, scan & rank resumes and other job recruitment documents. Recruiters are using ATS, because it scores candidates resumes according to some preset criteria and shows them which candidates are best fit for that particular job.

According to the study done by TopResume, the largest resume-writing service in the world, 98% of large organisations use ATS as a part of their recruiting Process. Also, Big companies receive about 50,000 to 75,000 resumes in a week and 75% of resumes will never be seen by human eyes. In this situation, we must ensure that our resumes are ATS friendly.

ATS scans the resumes for relevant keywords such as educational background, skills, job experiences etc. To get better scores, our resumes have to be formatted properly with relevant keywords.

How to create an ATS friendly resume?

Optimised resume with relevant keywords: We must identify the relevant keywords related to the job by reading the job description and these keywords must be incorporated into your resume. This can be your soft skills, hard skills, technical knowledge etc.

Use a clean resume design: If you are using some fancy templates, the ATS may be unable to read your resume. The information must be arranged in the proper way. Also, if you have too simple a design, the recruiters may not get attracted to it. So, the design must be clean, professional and ATS friendly. If you are facing difficulty in designing your resume, checkout our ATS friendly free resume templates which are available in the MS Word file format.

Run an ATS resume test: Before sending the resume, let’s do a simple ATS resume test by yourself. Copy the content from your resume, paste it into a plain text document. If all of your details are pasted properly in the document, your resume is ATS compliant. If the plain-text version is missing any details from your original resume, has characters saved incorrectly, or looks disorganized, you have to give attention to that.

So, Don’t let the bots stop you from landing your dream job. Make your resume ATS friendly.