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Robots and Resumes

You can have the best resume in the world, but no one's going to read it unless you can get it to an actual human being. HR departments have always used keyword searches, but with new AI tools, the filter has been turned up to 11.

HR now has robot guards, just like Kenny.

Copyright Matt Stone and Trey Parker, brazenly used without permission

I've been adding "Skills" to my LinkedIn profile, and I now have over 90 of the things. I wanted to add them to my resume for all the systems that don't talk to LinkedIn, so I copied them from my profile. Unfortunately, I ended up with a list that looked like this:

I have plenty of free time right now, but I'm not going to clean that list up manually. Fortunately, Excel (or Google Sheets) can be tricked into doing the dirty work.

The first step after pasting the big mess into Excel is to get rid of the Redundant WordsRedundant Words. I did that by calculating the number of column A's characters in column B using "=LEN(A2)", then putting the first half of the characters into column C using "=LEFT(A2,(B2/2))".

The next step is to get rid of the "# experiences..." lines. I did that by setting column D to be "=IF(ISNUMBER(VALUE(LEFT(A2,1))),"",C2)", so if the first character is a number, the value is dropped. That makes it easier to filter column D to remove the blanks, and then it's minor cleanup to get a nice big list of skills to paste into my resume.

I was told that someone on TikTok (always a great source for solid advice) recommended putting lists like this on your resume in tiny white text so the words get picked up by the robots but don't show up to humans. I'm going to go ahead and just put the list on there using visible text, and if someone wants to read it, more power to them.

Here's hoping that it's good enough to get past the robot guards.