How do robots eat guacamole? With microchips!

Thank you, thank you; I’m here all week. 

Last week on Instagram we dove into the world of Application Tracking Systems… aka.. Resume Robots. Just like the robots that crawl web pages to index which ones should show up for certain search terms, Resume Robots decide where your CV ends up on the SERP of a recruiter’s engine. (That was a serious SEO analogy there so if you didn’t get it, very sorry that’s on me.)

Let’s break it down:




Have you ever gotten that email that’s like “Hey girl, you weren’t a match for this job but we’ll keep your resume on file..” This is what they were talking about. 

So what do you do? 

Workarounds for Application Tracking Systems

1. Keep your cute, pdf resume for passing off to contacts that you know personally, or sliding into the hands of an actual human. Keep a basic, robot-friendly, and, frankly, boring resume for applying to jobs online. (This should be a word doc. Grab templates here.)
2. Update your resume (your boring one and your pretty one) for every job you apply for. Make sure you’re highlighting keywords in the job description that match up to your actual experience and skills.
3. Keep important bits of information out of places like the header, footer, or summary. Put them within your work experience. It is more likely that the robots will read them.
4. Keep formatting consistent and simple. (For example: If you know the exact date you started and left each company, GREAT! If not, you can just put the year or the month and year. But make sure whichever format you decide is consistent across each job you have listed.)
5.  Finally, do not try to TRICK the robots… just learn to speak their language. Some blogs and websites will tell you to keyword stuff your resume and change the text color to white. You can be flagged for this behavior. Don’t make a terrible first impression.

Is that enough robot-talk for your 2021? LMK!
xo Kels