Write a resume that gets past the filters
Here is the uncomfortable truth about applying online: at most mid-size and large companies, your resume is parsed, ranked and filtered by software before a recruiter sees it. If the system cannot read your file or cannot find the words it is looking for, the human stage never happens. The good news is that writing for the machine is not a dark art — it is mostly about removing obstacles you did not know you were creating.
Make it parseable — the five-minute fixes
Use a single-column layout. Two-column designs look great to humans and scramble badly in many parsers, which read left to right across the whole page. Skip text in headers and footers — plenty of systems ignore those areas entirely, which is exactly where people love to put their phone number. Export to PDF from a text editor, never as a scan or image. And use standard section names: Experience, Education, Skills. The parser is looking for those exact words to know where it is.
Mirror the language of the ad
Ranking systems compare your resume against the job description. If the ad says 'customer support' and your resume says 'client success', a simple matcher scores you lower for describing the same work. Before each application, reread the ad and adopt its vocabulary for the skills you genuinely have. This is not gaming the system — it is translating your experience into the language the employer already speaks. Never list skills you do not have; you are optimizing recognition, not inventing qualifications.
Write bullets a screener can verify
Once a human does look, they spend under a minute. Bullets that survive that minute share a shape: what you did, how, and what changed. 'Answered support tickets' is a duty. 'Handled 40+ support tickets a week and cut average response time from a day to two hours' is evidence. As a junior you may feel you have no numbers — but course projects, internships, part-time jobs and volunteer work all produce them if you look: users served, time saved, things shipped, people coordinated.
One page, in English, tailored lightly
For junior roles in international companies, one page is enough — screeners read the top third first, so put your strongest material there. Write it in English unless the ad itself is in another language. And tailor lightly per application: you do not need a rewrite, just the right three or four keyword adjustments and a reordered skills line. Ten focused applications beat fifty identical ones, every week of the search.
Workcamino shows you the full original ad — not a summary — so you can see exactly which words the employer uses and mirror them honestly. Buen camino.