Hey everyone this is Self Made
Millennial, I'm Madeline Mann. Today I'm going to
give you resume tips on how to tweak it
to make sure it passes through a
company's automated resume scanning
software. I'll tell you how to figure
out which keywords to put on your
resume, how many times you should put
them on your resume, where you should put
them, so that these resume scanning
robots will pass your resume along to
actual human eyes so you can get the
interview. This is a highly requested
video by you viewers so that's why I am
doing it, because I am here to serve you.
What many job seekers don't realize is
that up to 75 percent of resumes are
rejected before a human even ever
sees them, and that's because basically
all companies use an applicant tracking
system or an ATS, which is a way for them
to organize all the resumes that come in,
but some of these companies use the ATS
to actually scan the resume and move
those along to the recruiters which they
think meet certain qualifications. ATS'
scan from hard skills and soft skills,
not these things that I call "fuzzy facts."
Hard skills are things that are tactical
and technical, while soft skills are
tough to quantify, but they're core to a
job like communication skills or ability
to negotiate a contract. And the fuzzy
facts are things that you label yourself
as such as self-starter, high performer,
results-driven.
Sorry to say but an ATS does not care
about those fuzzy facts nor do any
humans, so leave them off your resume. So
what keywords should you include on your
resume? Well I think that you should go
find at least 3 or 4 job
descriptions that really fit the kind of
role that you want, and they're all very
similar. Take all of the job descriptions,
take all the text, and paste it into a
word cloud generator, and I'll link the
one I use in the description. And so I'm
going to show you an example of a word
cloud I generated from 4 UX designer
job descriptions. This word cloud tells
us the keywords that we need to have on
a resume like mock-ups, Agile,
Sketch, research, wireframes, as well as some
soft skills: creative, collaborate,
communication. Now that we know the most
important keywords to have on a resume,
let's now tailor our resume further to a
specific job description. So if I want to
apply to this designer role, I take a
look at the description, I see that
actually we have a lot of these keywords
already. We have Agile, we have 
wireframing, we have Sketch. But we're missing
some really important ones such as
having experience designing for these
kind of platforms and apps. We don't have
Gliffy, we would need to put that, as well
as we don't have anything about
prototyping. So we would likely get
rejected by these bots if we don't make
these updates to our resume. Make sure
those additional keywords are in your
resume but do not lie--I'm not telling you to
lie. Only put them in if you actually
have experience with them. Now let's move
on to the frequency and formatting of your
keywords. There are 2 ways that an ATS
determines the strength of the skill you
have. The first is the number of times it
appears on your resume, and the second
is the amount of time that skill was
used based on where it's placed on the
resume. Let's optimize for both. Let's
start with the number of times a keyword
should appear on your resume. So
especially for the very important skills,
make sure they appear on your resume 2
to 3 times. So for example, design and
wireframes were really big so we want to
make sure those both appear at least 2
times. I would also determine the
importance of keyword by the number of
times it shows up in that job's job
description. The way to do this is to
create a "core competencies" or "areas of
expertise" section on your resume that
displays your greatest hard and soft
skills. But make sure, double check, that
there are no fuzzy facts on there. If
something has an abbreviation like SEO
for search engine optimization,
I would include both the abbreviated
version and the full version. And then
drizzle those keywords into your work
experience and education sections where
appropriate. Now let's talk about the
length of experience for a skill, which is
the second
way that an ATS determines through keywords
if you are qualified. The way the ATS
works in this case is they read the
amount of time that you were at a job, so
let's say it was from January 2015 to
January 2018, that's 3 years, so let's
say some of the skills you listed, one of
them is that you built a training
facilitation. So that skill of building
training facilitations
will now be assigned the amount of 3
years experience. If a skill is just
hanging out on its own, like it's up
there in that core competency section
we were talking about, then it is
automatically ascribed 6 months
experience. So that's why it's important
to reiterate your skills throughout your
resume. You know, it's a little bit tricky
because I'll tell people this and then
they will just pack their resume full of
keywords and it's almost like they
forgot that humans have to read this, so
there's kind of a balance there. You
really want your resume to be showing
your accomplishments and I really
believe that if you're doing this word
cloud and you're reading the job
description and tuning your resume to be
towards that job description, you're
going to be okay. So we just went over a lot,
let's review. Create a word cloud with a
few similar job descriptions and then
use those main words to put into your
initial resume draft. Second, before you
apply to the job, make sure you read the job
description. Pull out those additional
key words and rearrange your resume to
focus on those words. Third, keep in mind
the number of times a word shows up on
your resume, and you can use a skills
section to help with this. Fourth, pay
attention to how much time is ascribed
to each skill based on the amount of
time you're at each job where that
keyword appears. And fifth, give it a good
read over to make sure that human can
still understand your story and
accomplishments. That's it everyone,
please do not overthink it too much, like
I said, most people don't even read job
descriptions so I know that you can be
better than that. Make sure you hit
subscribe because I am coming in hot
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Thanks everyone, Wi-Fi high five.
