That free resume template from a popular site nearly cost me an interview

I spent hours filling out one of those fancy two-column resume templates last month. Sent it to a job I really wanted and got radio silence for two weeks. Then a friend in HR told me those templates confuse the automated screening software. I rewrote it as a plain single-column text doc and got a call back in 3 days. Has anyone else had their resume completely ignored because of formatting?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_alice2d ago

i'm gonna push back on this a little because i think people blame formatting way too fast. the plain text thing worked for you, great, but correlation isn't causation. maybe the second resume just had better keywords or you rewrote it more carefully the second time around. @bennett.evan's buddy could have gotten hired for a dozen other reasons like timing or luck. those two column templates look clean and organized to human eyes, and if a company's software is so brittle it can't scan a simple layout, that's their problem not yours. sometimes we're too quick to assume the format was the villain when it might have just been the content.

bennett.evan3d ago

Buddy of mine got ghosted for months then fixed it with plain text and got hired.

victor7793d ago

12 weeks of silence from a recruiter who said "we'll be in touch" and then this guy sends a two sentence email that just says "hey still interested" and gets a call back in 3 hours. I swear @bennett.evan hiring processes are just random number generators sometimes. Maybe we should all try writing like cavemen and see what happens.