Is your resume ready for the Information Age?

Financial site Bankrate offers this article on Resumes in cyberspace. It’s a treasure trove of tips on how to format a resume that’s optimized for OCR and filled with relevant keywords that will get the attention of that potential employer.

Under the “Gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of that” heading:

Abandon “serif” fonts — that is, fonts with little jots and tittles hanging off the ends of the letters. OCR doesn’t like jots and tittles. Instead use a “sans serif” font, like Arial.

Likewise, we should avoid using brackets or parentheses, which can confuse OCR. To this list, I would add slashes; I’ve OCRed many scanned PDFs and found myself gritting my teeth at every “and/or,” which the OCR rendered as either “andor” or “andlor.”

The article also suggests including a list of keywords likely to be used as search terms by recruiters. Sounds a little like search engine optimization, but I guess that’s what it is.

Bankrate: Resumes in cyberspace