What You Need to Know when Writing a Scannable Resume

Building your resume should be one of the most time consuming parts of any job search. Your resume is the document that will either land you an interview or will wind your expression of interest in a company in the pile that nets you the dreaded "Thanks for your resume" letter.

The first thing to remember is that your resume is a brochure, a sales pamphlet. It is important to remember that your resume will not get you a job; it will get you an interview. You should think long and hard about your journey to where you currently are, how you got there, where you want to go and what actions you have taken to prepare yourself for that ongoing journey. Your job then is to accurately communicate this.

Once you've made those connections, the next step is deciding how to best express your previous work experience, how to arrange your credentials on the paper, what to say. You will need to know where you will be sending your resume: will a person be screening your paperwork, or will it be screened electronically?

Increasingly, recruiters and companies have begun to turn to resume databases, searching the resume submissions for specific skills and traits. This means that fewer humans will actually be reading your resume before you're selected for an interview. If you're applying at a smaller company, perhaps this technology has not been implemented and screening is done by hand. Depending on the circumstance, this will be important in the design of your materials. Here's a hint: if an advertisement specifically requests a scannable resume, you will need to take a different tack than when you're confident there will only be a person reading at the other end.

When writing a scannable, or text, resume, you will have to be mindful of specific terms and current vernacular of the industry or field. You will need to specifically address the "language" of the field, include industry acronyms and associated "jargon."

You should include those items that you would otherwise include in a regular resume: education, experience, major/minor, etc. When in doubt, say it twice: Write out Bachelors Degree and parenthetically add "BA."

The traditional advice is to use "action verbs" to describe your experience. While this remains important - afterall, after a database spits out your credentials, another human being will read your resume as well - you will need to include key words and phrases as well. Those phrases specific to your industry will be important as will be any successes. The rule of thumb I always advocate is to not bog your resume down with job descriptions, but to describe why the company and position were better for you having been in that position. With a scannable resume, you'll want to describe your job as well. While perhaps attractive, loading your resume down with such things as, "NOT Top 10 in class" and "never did system analysis with quadratic separator" will not likely find your materials in someone's "TO INTERVIEW" pile. Never lie on your resume - only bad things happen.

To avoid confusing the character recognition used in scanning applications, use only standard fonts, and preferably those used in business. It is always good form to avoid odd, unique, or modified fonts in any business communication, but in this case it is more important as these can only serve to confuse any character recognition being done. Sans serif fonts (arial, for instance).

When designing documents for human consumption, most job seekers want to keep their resumes to one page - or at most two - and will often stretch out margins and reduce font point size to accommodate the need to reduce the amount of physical space the document. When designing text resumes, this is less important. Make sure your point sizes are standard business size - 12 point is typically the safest - and make sure to keep your lines to a max of 65-80 characters. Since it then becomes more likely you will use more than one page, you should make sure you put your name on all pages and number them (Page 1 of 2).

Any extraneous forced attributes such as bold face, underlines, bullets, etc. will only serve to confuse scanning applications. Where you might otherwise use bullets, use dashes ("- - "). Avoid using anything other than black text, avoid shading or any other attribute that could only confuse the character recognition. Also, adding columns to your resume - a touch that some MS Office templates use - look nice to the human eye, but will only confound a scanner. Avoid these.

As with the more traditional resume, the headings and content are important. My recommendation would be to capitalize the section headings, leaving a line space between the heading and the entry.

Delivering your materials are just as important. Read the posting carefully and apply using any specific means the company requests. Some larger companies will have resume guidelines posted on their website - make sure you've read these before submitting.

My suspicion is that when a company has invested in the data warehousing system required for resume collection, ones best bet is to email or fax (what with the prevalence of fax-to-inbox systems) your materials. This would obviously be for ease of processing. If you do decide to mail the materials snail mail, make sure its done in a flat envelope, avoiding folding at all costs. In the absence of direction from the company, my preference would be to email, fax, then snail mail although reasonable people can disagree on this - the recommendation to fax, is premised on the idea that most companies will direct that fax to a scanner, however if they do not, the fax could be a bad idea.

If you are mailing, note that often times I will see resumes printed on outlandishly colored paper, I suspect to allow it to "Stand out" from the crowd. Without speaking to the wisdom of such a strategy, when writing text resumes, the advice is to use only high quality white or lightly tinted paper. Avoid resume paper with any flecks or imperfections in it. The rationale for this likely not in the typical job seekers' consciousness, but it has a very clear one: darker paper obscures the text on it, flecks will create "noise" that scanners can't quite figure out - and in the absence of "knowing" what the character is, it will make something up that "looks" like it. Frankly, even if you're not preparing a text resume, this is good advice regardless. Frequently, when a hiring manager has a team of interviewers, each will receive a copy of your resume. If the paper you have chosen makes it difficult to see your credentials, you place yourself in a difficult situation.

My best wishes are with you in your job search.