Electronic and Scannable Resumes

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Electronic and Scannable Resumes

Increasingly, companies are using computers to help manage the volume of résumés for their job openings. Electronic applicant tracking is a new process by which résumés are entered into a database using coding methods or artificial intelligence. The computer programs read and extract information from the résumé , then store the data in the corporate database for matching to job openings. However, if the résumé is difficult to read, much of the information in the résumé will be discarded.

Résumé format

Computer scanner software programs must be able to distinguish between the capital letter "I" (as in Ivory), the letter "l" (as in luck), and the number "1". This font clearly shows the difference. But look what happens with the same characters in Times Roman font: Ivory, luck, number 1.

Several factors can cause the scanner or Optical Character Recognition software to confuse these and other similar characters. Résumés printed by inkjet printers, or facsimile machines, may lack the sharpness and clarity required for scanning, or the fonts used may be too close together, too small or too fancy for the scanner or OCR software to read the characters properly. Here are some tips to help you format your résumé for computer scanning:

Use common fonts like Times Roman, Courier, and Bookman.
Use a font size of at least 11 points for Courier, and 12 points for Times Roman or Bookman.
Do not use condensed or expanded spacing between the letters.
Use left margin justification. Do not use both right and left justification because it stretches letter and word spacing.
Avoid italics, underlines, boxes, shadow or shading effects, or reversed colors.
Eliminate braces, brackets, graphics, tabs or hard returns at the end of the line.
Do not use horizontal or vertical lines.
Do not use columnar formats (e.g. newspaper).