Scanned Resumes
Keywords
Put in an entire section with nothing but keywords under the heading of skills. Keywords include every program you have used, every programming language you know, and all the job skills you possess.Jargon is important. Research the positions you want and compile a list of the words you see repeated in the ads—you will probably come up with a number of skills that you already possess.
Don't limit yourself to the obvious. Even job titles vary—tech writing positions can be listed as content masters, editors, information designers, knowledge engineers, project managers, and more.
After you have the keywords in en masse, make sure you tie them into the rest of your resume. No one is going to believe you have the skills unless you can prove that you developed them somewhere. Don't lie, but be sure to relate any applicable experience to technical writing.
OCR
Optical character recognition (OCR) programs have come a long way, but you still need to use legible fonts. Verdana and Lucida Sans were both designed for legibility, but you can choose any font you want. Just look for a large x height and definitely use a sans serif font.Do not use any bullets or emphasized font faces. Bullets, boldfacing, underscoring, and italics all increase the possibility of OCR error.
Style
Use left justification for everything and use the dreaded ALL CAPS for headings. When you are done, pray that you can redeem yourself with a properly formatted resume at your interview.Resume Intro Word Resume ASCII Resumes PDF Resumes Home
© 1999, Paul Dunham