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Creating Scannable Resumes
Creating Scannable Resumes
What does "Scannable" mean?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software scans or looks at your resume and/or cover letter to distinguish every character (letter & number) and creates a text file. Artificial intelligence then "reads" the text and extracts important information about you, such as:
- Your Name
- Address
- Telephone Number
- Work History
- Education
- Skills
- Keyword Summary (recruiters and managers use scannable resume databases to search for applicants with specific keywords)
The resume should contain as many facts about you as possible in order to match your skills to as many opportunities as possible.
SCANNABLE FORMAT
There are three ways to use a scannable resume:
- You can mail it (snail mail)
- You can fax it
- You can submit it online.
Depending on which method you select, some of the following rules may or may not be applicable.
REMINDER: If mailing or faxing, you should provide a clean, original resume. Scanners can extract skills from most styles of resumes (Combination, Chronological or Functional). A poor quality resume or one with a non-standard format will not be scanned correctly.
HOW TO MAXIMIZE SCANNABILITY
- Use white 8 1/2 x 11 paper.
- Do not fold or staple.
- Use standard font face (Times New Roman, Arial, Courier).
- Use a font size of no less than 12 and no more than 14 points.
- Do not condense spacing between lines.
- Use all capital letters for section headings.
- Do not use italics, underline, shadows, bold and dashes.
- Do not use vertical or horizontal lines.
- Place your personal information on each page (if resume is more than one page).
- List each telephone number on its own line, with no dashes (use spaces instead of dashes).
HOW TO MAXIMIZE RESUME HITS
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