When it comes to creating a resume, there is often the temptation to impress. A lot of Canadian job seekers go overboard with this. Oftentimes, job seekers miss it. A resume is meant to inform and convince, and not necessarily for visual appeal.

Make sure you are not going overboard

If you’re a Canadian job applicant, I’ll advise you to keep your Canadian style meant simple and easy to understand. It is true that a beautiful template, charts and custom designs may impress a human recruiter. However, your primary goal is to ensure it actually gets to the human recruiter. This involves beating the meant Canadian resume robots also known as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

With all of your formatting, graphics, pictures and tables, it may be impossible for an ATS to actually scan and read your meant . So it ends up in a dark hole; with all its formatting and beautiful designs. Simplicity is key when writing a Canadian-styled meant . You must submit your meant in a way that the ATS can easily read it. Use simple fonts that are commonly used, simple bullets (if you must), a simple top to bottom format without columns, and submit the document as a word file, not a pdf file, unless specifically instructed to do so.

While you’re at it, it is important to Optimize your meant by incorporating the keywords found on the job posting. Do not simply copy and paste them on your resume. Instead, describe your experience, career highlights, soft and hard skills and education using them intelligently.

Apart from the Applicant Tracking System being able to read your meant, you want to make sure it is not too complicated for the human recruiter as well. Recruiters usually have only a few seconds to glance through your meant because they have many of those to look at. So they should see the important stuff as quickly as possible. Getting it muddled up or buried in heavy graphics might complicate things for you. Remember, the rule is to Keep it Simple!