Warning: That resume scanner almost killed my application until I changed one thing

I was at a career fair in Chicago last month and a recruiter told me the AI rejected my resume because the font was off. Switched to Arial and got three callbacks in a week. Anyone else run into weird formatting tricks with those bots?

3 comments

3 Comments

smith.nancy4d ago

oh man, that is exactly what happened to me last year. I was sending out resumes for weeks and getting nothing back, then a friend told me to check the formatting. I had used some fancy script font for my headings and the scanner just trashed it. Soon as I switched everything to plain Arial with standard bullet points, I got interviews from three companies in two weeks. It is insane how picky those bots are about stuff people never even think about.

ivanbell4d ago

I gotta push back on that a little. "Picky bots" aren't the real problem here - if your resume needed a simple font change to be readable, that's kind of on you. These systems have been around for years now, and there's tons of free advice online about using standard formatting. I'm glad you got interviews after fixing it, but I bet those three companies just had better requirements in their job postings that matched your resume better. The bot is just following rules someone set, it didn't personally "trash" your fancy font. People act like these systems are out to get them, but they're really just doing exactly what the company asked them to do.

carter.joseph4d ago

Did you try tweaking the job titles in your resume too? @smith.nancy I had a similar thing happen and when I matched my job titles closer to the wording in the postings, it helped even more than the font change.