One of comic Steven Wright’s jokes provides a nice little lesson in irony: "I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place." Similarly, our work lives are rich in irony: Just as technology has enabled any one of us to build a resume that is stunning in appearance, blaring bells and whistles, the irony is that technology now also sometimes requires us to create resumes virtually stripped of form and dazzle. Companies, especially large ones, occasionally require job candidates to submit a "scannable resume"—that is, a resume written so that a scanner, using optical character recognition software, can code your resume into a database. Once in the database, the resume can be selected for the later viewing by human eyes (yes, irony emerges again) based on the number of "hits."
Presumably, if a company is scanning your resume it will typically announce that fact and give you guidelines for writing and submitting it. If there is any doubt, you could always phone, e-mail, or visit a company’s website to determine if the company scans resumes. Frankly, computer scanning of resumes was much more popular in the 1990s and has waned in the years that followed, so you may never need to be concerned about the issue. However, if you do need to prepare a scannable resume, you must school yourself in matters of format, content, and method of delivery.
Here are two highly recommended sites on writing a computer scannable resume:
"How to Write an ATS Resume" from novoresume.com [1]
"Scannable Resumes Presentation" from the Purdue Online Writing Lab [2]