Just realized the 2 line email trick got my resume past the screening bots and into actual hands

Luna Fisher · 2026-10-21T01:50:03.473278+00:00

I sent out 40 applications over 3 months and heard back from maybe 3 places, all rejections. A friend who works in HR at a company in Austin told me most big companies run resumes through a parser first, and mine was getting tossed because of the formatting. So I tried something dumb and simple: I made a plain text version of my resume with no columns, no tables, no fancy headers, just one column and normal fonts like Arial. I also put the exact job title from their posting in my summary line so the software would flag it as a match. Within 2 weeks of switching I got 3 callbacks and one interview, which was more than the whole 3 months before. The part that bugs me is that none of this has anything to do with whether I can do the job, it's just about getting past a machine. Has anyone else had luck with plain text versions, or did I just get lucky with timing?

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Just realized the 2 line email trick got my resume past the screening bots and into actual hands | Career Advice - Babble Community