Dynamic Resume Sections

Use these sections of your resume to target specific jobs!

A little perspective about your resume and dynamics!

The ultimate goal of ATS is to store the resume data of every person on the planet, indexed and searchable so that recruiters can easily and quickly find the very best available candidates worldwide and offer them opportunities provided they are open to being contacted. Your skills and many other aspects of your footprint are being indexed, stored, and accessed by Artificial Intelligence, sometimes thousands of times per day. Just one ATS system alone has nearly 1 billion resumes on file and it tracks every single change in your resume constantly and automatically. If this sounds a little like George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" it is. If you are reminded of Arnold in "Rise of the Machines" it could be. Love it or hate it, Artificial Intelligence is here and it is growing exponentially.

Elon Musk is often quoted, saying "AI poses an existential threat to humanity." Meanwhile, he is taking advantage of this point in time by building autonomous robot vehicles and most recently, humanoid robots that appear and act highly human. He is planning to use AI to fly to and create a Martian settlement. 

You do not have to be a passive player in all this. There is no tacit agreement that says you are fixed in stone.  In China, 200 A.D. documents were etched on wood blocks and for more important tomes, in stone.  In 1040 the Chinese had moveable typeface, which was a great improvement, but a real pain in the neck to change.  By 1961 America had IBM Selectrimatic typewriters that could self-correct, but significant changes needed to be retyped.  Today, you can store your resume in the cloud, access it with your smartphone, change it and send it. And THAT is exactly what you should do in order to take advantage of ATS and make it work for you, not just for recruiters and employers. 

 Although you shouldn't change your history, virtually everything else is fair game, and if your resume is structured properly, its actually easy to change very quickly which can make your resume much more competitive, sometimes by several magnitudes!
 

So then, What should I change?

Job Title and Traits

The Job Title, Traits, Professional Profile, and Core Competencies Index are non-historical dynamic components of your resume that can be adjusted to target a specific job opportunity.

For example, Employer Job Descriptions almost always contain a wish list of what they are seeking. It starts with the job title.  ATS is going to produce a higher score for candidates who have previous experience in the job title. So, if you have either previously held the title or if you are qualified to hold the title, then use the exact job title as the header for your Professional Profile. 

Carefully read the employer's job listing and note the key traits they are looking for. Display underneath your job title, your three best traits that best match the three most important traits the employer is looking for.

Just by matching job title and traits, you are already looking like someone that should be interviewed! 

What is a Professional Profile?

A Professional Profile is a short, concise introductory section on your resume that highlights your relevant qualifications and skills. Including a professional profile can have some advantages. First, your resume profile concisely features your skills and professional experience in a way that gets the employer's attention.

Recruiters typically scan resumes and do not spend much time reading each one in its entirety. Because of this, your Professional Profile can be an effective way to quickly show your employer how you will be an asset to the position you're applying for. We know most of the time spent on a resume is the top half of page one, so that is where your professional profile (elevator pitch) should go. 

Another benefit of including a Professional Profile is that you can highlight specific skills and expertise that employers require for a certain position. For example, an educator's Professional Profile might highlight classroom management, curriculum development, and teaching skills when seeking an elementary school teaching position. 

What is a Core Competencies Index?

What is a Core Competencies Index on a resume? Core competencies, also known as your "core qualifications" is a list of your qualifications for a job. A core competencies section includes your skills, certifications, knowledge of different software products, and personality traits that make you a desirable candidate. When targeting a specific job opportunity, the index entries can be adjusted to match the employer's nomenclature in order to better sync with ATS.
For example, ATS is an exact match engine, and if ATS is seeking "mechanical design engineer" and your index entry has "mechanical engineer" you will not score as high for this term as another candidate who has matched the exact term. You can adjust your Core Competencies Index to exactly match an employer's posted requirements. This is a very powerful strategy that is highly effective in passing ATS screening gates.

I place a Core Competencies Index in very small print at the bottom of page 2 of the resume. I know two things, most recruiters ignore it and ATS devours it, reads every word, and does not care where the index is placed. 

Tip: You can copy the employer's job description into a word cloud and quickly see which words and terms are used the most. This takes about 5 minutes and can be well word it. One free word cloud source is: https://www.wordclouds.com/   
 

The Next Step

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