Today, I helped a friend who had applied to 120 jobs without getting a single interview. He was feeling really frustrated because he is highly qualified. After taking a look at his resume, I realized the issue right away. He had used a visually appealing, two-column Canva template that included progress bars for his skills and a small photo in the corner. While it looked great to the human eye, it wasn't working with the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) like Workday and Taleo that many companies use. These systems read resumes in a top-to-bottom, left-to-right manner, and his layout was causing the software to scramble his experience and flag his application as incomplete before it even reached a recruiter. We decided to switch everything to a simple, single-column Word document without any graphics or columns. The change was drastic. Within just two weeks of applying with the new format, he received three callbacks. If anyone else is struggling with job applications, I’d be happy to take a look at your resume to see if it’s ATS-friendly.
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