Getting a project management job

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) are the automated filtering system that makes applying for a job overly complicated nowadays. These systems are automatically reading your resumes to parse out the information that recruiters have identified as important. You cannot get through to a hiring manager without defeating the ATS first. At its most basic, the most powerful characteristic of a resume that can get through the ATS filter is simple and consistent formatting.

For each role stick to:

• Company Name

• Role Name

• 1-2 sentences for a role description

• 1-2 bullets of quantified achievements

Don't worry about a pretty resume, standard fonts laid out simply and consistently are best for effective machine-reading of a resume.

Make sure you can quantify aspects of your work, reference data that is meaningful to outcomes of the role you are describing. The difference between "Met 100% of schedule targets on 28 projects over 3 years" and "Of all of the projects I completed during my time at Cool Company none were completed later than was agreed upon" is that one provides clear information, while the other buries it amidst vague language. The first provides multiple metrics over the course of the sentence, contextualizing them both in pace and business outcomes. The second doesn't provide any meaning to the details, and also doesn't make it clear whether you completed all of one project or all of one hundred projects on time; in addition it's a wall of text that the reader must parse meaning from on their own.

This doesn't mean coming up with meaningless numbers - hiring managers will see through data that is without meaning. For instance, will anyone care that you sent more than 100 status reports last year? Probably not, sending status reports is part of your core job as a project manager - meeting expectations, not achievement. It's achievements you want to focus on quantifying.

In terms of how to present these numbers, it's often best to bullet them out, one or two key data points for each role. It'll be obvious when you have significant information worth deviating from that guidance, but it's important to remember to avoid a barrage of numbers in the same way you'd avoid a wall of text.

In the same manner that you are quantifying you achievements, make your personal skills and experience with tools easily accessible to someone who is just skimming your resume - be realistic, if you bury this information in a wall of text they simply won't see it. In addition, it's important to present the information in a way that helps place these skills in context. Did you use that tool once 10 years ago, or in your last three roles? Are you describing skills in strategy around your schedule coordinator role or your delivery manager role?

These differences might matter to the hiring manager reading your resume. Moreover, these are the types of information that recruiters are going to be searching for, and ATS systems are going to be screening for. Make it easily discoverable by having it clearly separated and related visually to the relevant experience entries. In today's hiring some hiring managers are trying to understand how they are going to onboard you onto existing toolsets or delivery frameworks - and if you have related experience you need to make that abundantly clear, or you might get dropped off the list of candidates.

The days are long gone when you might have deposited a standard templated resume at a place of business. Instead, today your resume will inevitably be submitted on a website, or through an email, in response to a well-articulated job description. The likelihood is high that your resume will pass through an ATS system looking for keywords. If you've followed the guidance above you should have a resume well-optimized for getting through this filter - but your content still needs to meet the mark. Part of the achieving that involves customization any particular resume submittal to align with keywords in the job description. If you've not done this before it might momentarily feel like lying to change how you've written your resume to match words in the job description, but unfortunately it's part of the deal. The reality is that ATS systems exist, and different people use different terms to refer to the same concepts. Additionally, your template resume might speak to sometime generally that is dealt with more specifically in a job description - so changing the language so a hiring manager actually gets to read about it is the purpose behind the is customization.

To go about this, keep a standard resume template, and save a new copy for each submittal. This way you are always starting from a standard starting point, and don't lose key information that may have been irrelevant for the last submittal but is important for the next one. If your experience leads you to submit to for more than one type of typical role description, consider optimizing two or more templates that better align to those role descriptions - to limit the customization you need to do in any particular circumstance.