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Spent 3 years formatting resumes with fancy templates and then a recruiter told me she skips those
I had this whole color-coded layout with icons and graphs until a recruiter at a job fair in Austin said her ATS can't read any of that. Anyone else waste time on design when plain text would have worked better?
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jennifer83326d ago
Depends on the industry honestly. In trades and technical fields nobody cares about fancy formatting, they just want to see your certs and experience listed out clean. But if you're going for graphic design or marketing, having a boring plain text resume might make you look like you have zero creativity. I've seen both sides work, it's all about who's reading it.
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Man yeah I spent two weeks building a resume in this design software once with this perfect two column layout. Then I found out the recruiter printed it in black and white and my color-coded sections looked like random gray blobs. Still kinda stings when I think about it.
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joel_clark3726d ago
Nah I gotta push back on this. Fancy resumes work fine if you know what you're doing. I've sent out these wild designs with infographics and stuff for years and got callbacks constantly. The ATS thing is overblown - most companies use their own systems that handle PDFs fine now. If you're applying to some tiny shop running ancient software that's on them not you. A clean crisp design shows you give a damn and stand out in a stack of boring white pages.
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