How to check your resume reads properly, in five minutes

Every piece of resume advice assumes the words on your page reach the other end. Usually they do. When they do not, nothing tells you, and every other improvement you make is being thrown away.

So this is the check worth doing before anything else, and it is free.

Check one: can you select the text?

1. 1.Open your resume.
2. 2.Try to highlight one line with your cursor.
3. 3.If the words highlight, there is real text in the file. If nothing highlights, or the whole page selects as a single block, your resume is a picture.

A picture of a resume contains no text to extract. Every system that reads it gets nothing. This happens more than you would expect, usually from scanning a printout, photographing one, or exporting an image from a design tool.

If you fail this one, stop. Nothing else matters until the file has text in it.

Check two: read the plain text version

This is the one almost nobody does and it is the useful one.

1. 1.Select everything in your resume and copy it.
2. 2.Open any plain text editor. Notepad, TextEdit in plain text mode, or an empty box on a website. Anywhere that will not keep your formatting.
3. 3.Paste.

What you are looking at is close to what a parser gets. Now read it as though you have never seen the document, and check four things.

If all four are clean, your file parses. That rules out the most damaging and least visible failure there is, and you can go back to worrying about the writing.

What these checks cannot tell you

Quite a lot, honestly. They prove the words got out of the file. They say nothing about whether the words are any good.

• Whether the first third of page one says the right thing, which is most of what a reader reacts to.
• Whether your bullets describe duties or results. The difference is the most common writing problem there is.
• Which terms your field expects that you have not used, and so cannot be found by.
• What your public links say about you, if the role is one where somebody will look.

Getting a second opinion

This is where a tool helps, and where to be a bit careful about which one. The thing worth having is the extracted text shown back to you, with specific problems and specific rewrites. The thing worth ignoring is a percentage with no explanation. There is a comparison of the categories here, including when a subscription is genuinely the right buy and when it is not.

What a good read should give you, in rough order of usefulness:

1. 1.The text that came out of your file, so you can see the damage yourself.
2. 2.What a reader concludes in the first few seconds, because that is the real filter.
3. 3.The specific lines that are weak, with a reason for each.
4. 4.A rewrite you can actually use, not a note telling you to be more impactful.
5. 5.The terms your field expects and you have missed.

The short version

Select the text. If it does not highlight, rebuild the file. If it does, paste it somewhere plain and read what comes out. Five minutes, no cost, and it rules out the one failure that quietly wastes every application you send.