Job Search for newcomers 101: How to Tailor your Resume

So, you've already perfected your Master Resume and LinkedIn account and feel ready to finally get your feet wet, right? It's time to start applying to actual jobs!

The most common places to look online for positions in Toronto (and, Canada, as a whole) are websites like Indeed, Workopolis, Monster, Glassdoor, and, of course, LinkedIn, where you can perform advanced searches by area, job title and even set up alerts for a certain keyword.

After doing a little bit of research you found a position that you're really interested in and you think you'd be a perfect match for. What do you do? Send out that beautiful master resume of yours? N to the O. NO! You must customize your resume first. Just like a Tailor would do to a suit.

But why is that? Because of a little thing called ATS: application tracking system.

What HR professionals here do is basically take the content out of your resume and compare it to the job posting to see how good a match you really are. That's the reason you have to carefully read the ad to extract the most relevant keywords that you should incorporate in your resume to make sure you increase your chances to pass this initial screening.

It's very comparable to SEO techniques to optimize your website to organically appear on search engines like Google.

Do resist the temptation of filling up your resume with as many keywords as you can. If you get above 80% of match the software will probably rule you out as well, just as Google would penalize you for cluttering your website with unrelated keywords to get traffic.

The good news is that you can use tools such as Jobscan to see how you're doing before you send in your version of the resume. Remember: the software takes into account the number of times the keyword is mentioned throughout the document. Make sure you review the entire thing before submitting and incorporate the most relevant keywords whenever possible.

In my experience, and by talking to many other people about theirs as well, the number of responses received after starting to tailor the resume increased a lot.

The use of ATS is also something that explains a better performance of resumes sent using DOC rather than PDF. I guess the software can't read PDF format very well.

So, start really breaking down those job postings and finding ways to show your experiences in a way that better matches what the employers are looking for.

Another thing is that you should only leave information on the resume that is relevant to the position you're applying. Some examples: the job posting says that they want someone with a University Degree, and you have a Master's. Leave that information only in the Education section of the resume, and, instead of using "Bachelor's"degree, try using the same wording they are using.

Hope that you've found this information useful.

See you next time and good luck with your search!

#jobhunting #TailoredResumes