Once we realized that our perfect solution was imperfect, we got back to work. We needed to find a way to make the ATS-friendly resume formula that we’d created visually attractive for recruiters and hiring managers. What we learned was that if we even made a tiny change to a design element, it could cause a big problem for the ATS system – there was something in their programming that just couldn’t accept the hierarchical changes that made a resume look better.

So the answer was not to make changes to the ATS-Compliant resume. We tried another approach, working on finding a way to take a visually attractive resume and an ATS-proof version and turn the two documents into one. After many hours and many attempts, we finally found a way to do it. We layered the two documents together, making the beautiful resume completely invisible to the computers and the bland, ATS-Compliant version invisible to humans. We tested, and retested and tested again, sending our bot-proof version to all of the ATS systems and they made it through every time.

Our success left us ecstatic, and needless to say there was a good deal of celebrating in our office. We had succeeded in creating an ATS Compliant resume that would make a great first impression on a recruiter!