Of Robots and Resumes

http://lifehacker.com/5866630/how-can-i-make-sure-my-resume-gets-past-resume-robots-and-into-a-humans-hand

Sad but true.

Used to be that a human being would spend 5 seconds skimming your resume to see whether or not you looked good enough in that short amount of time to take a closer look. Now, even that work has been farmed out to a robot. Bluntly put, if a prospective employer gets 5,000 resumes, even assuming no breaks for the restroom, lunch, or even bandaging the papercuts, he or she would spend about 7 hours looking through them all. Nobody in the real world has that kind of time! (And their brains would be mush by the time they got through the first hour anyway.)

Here’s a good post on how to get past the robot, and into human hands. It’s not foolproof, but this article does have a series of strategies you can use to game the system. Lots of links to other sites are included.

This might be a good Christmas break project: setting up a strategy that will give you a human-readable resume that makes it past the screeners.