Career insights and stories

PMP holders earn 33% more. AWS certs add 26% to salary. Where to place certifications on your resume by experience level, the exact line format, and which credentials actually move the needle.

76% of recruiters start their search with skills. Most resumes miss 52% of job-description keywords. Hard, soft, and AI skills by role, plus the 8-12 sweet spot.

Most templates marketed as "minimalist" either break ATS (sidebars, icons, tables for layout) or are blandly identical (Times New Roman with wider margins). The right minimalist resume is restrained, ATS-readable, and visually distinct in a narrow band. Full structure, fonts, spacing, and template.

InDesign produces the cleanest ATS-safe PDFs of any design tool. Adobe charges $240/year for it. The 3 cases worth paying, the gotchas, when to skip it.

Apache OpenOffice has been on life support since 2015. The 5-minute switch to LibreOffice, the templates that work in both, and why your old .odt files don't need to change.

LibreOffice is one of the cleanest ATS-export tools available. The real problem is template scarcity. 5 worth using, the DOCX gotcha, when to switch to Google Docs.

Figma's native PDF export converts text to vector outlines. ATS reads the file as blank. The plugin fix, when designers should use Figma anyway, when not.

PowerPoint stores resume text as separate slide objects. ATS reads them in creation order, not visual order. The 3 fixes, when it's defensible, when not.

Apple Pages ships 9 free resume templates. Only a few survive ATS parsing intact. Which ones to use, the ligature setting that breaks the rest, and the export trick that fixes everything.

LaTeX makes the prettiest resume in the stack. It also fails half of ATS parsers. 5 free templates (Jake's, Awesome-CV, Deedy, ModernCV, Europass) compared, Overleaf workflow, the honest fix.

Notion is great for drafting a resume but its PDF export breaks most ATS parsers. 4 free templates compared, the export workaround, and when to just use a doc.