Your Resume Is Being Screened by a Machine Before Any Recruiter Sees It — Here Is How It Works for OPT STEM OPT Candidates

Most companies hiring today — roughly 85 percent of them — use an ATS to screen resumes before a human ever looks at them. When you apply to a job the ATS is the first thing that touches your resume and it works by scanning your resume and calculating a match score based on how closely your experience lines up with the job description. It screens you on several things — your job titles, your years of experience, your education, the tools and technologies you listed, and how frequently the right keywords appear throughout your resume. That last part is called word density and it matters more than most people think. If the job posting mentions Python ten times and your resume mentions it once your match score drops even if you are genuinely skilled in it. The system does not know you are good at something unless the words on your resume match the words in the job description — it is not making judgments it is just matching text. For OPT and STEM OPT candidates applying through staffing agencies your resume can get screened twice — once by the staffing company and once by the end client like Amazon or JP Morgan — which means a poorly optimized resume gets filtered out before anyone gives you a chance. Read the job description carefully, find the keywords that show up most often, and make sure those exact words appear naturally throughout your resume every single time you apply.