A few months ago, I got on the phone with a woman who was exhausted.

She had been applying for eight months after being laid off.
Eight. Months.

Not a single interview.

She was a seasoned Electronic Medical Records Manager — highly experienced, deeply knowledgeable, someone who had led complex systems and teams. This was not an entry-level candidate trying to “break in.” She was an expert in her field.
And yet… nothing.

By the time she reached me, I could hear the frustration in her voice. She wasn’t rude, but she was short. Guarded. Discouraged. I was her last call — her last attempt before she decided the system was simply broken.

She was convinced:
The job market was rigged.
Recruiters weren’t paying attention.
Companies didn’t know how to hire.

And I understood why she felt that way. When you’re doing everything you know to do and still getting silence, it’s defeating.

But I also knew something she didn’t.

It wasn’t the market.
It was her resume.
She had created it in Apple Pages.

Here’s what many professionals don’t realize — especially smart, capable people who are fully qualified:

Your resume does not go to a recruiter or hiring manager first.
It goes to software.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) don’t admire design.
They don’t appreciate modern formatting and pretty colors.

They don’t care about columns, graphics, or visual polish.
They scan for clean, structured, linear text.

And certain platforms — including Pages, Canva, heavily designed templates, text boxes, graphics, and even some PDF exports — can quietly scramble content when parsed.

When that happens, your experience doesn’t disappear.
It just becomes unreadable.

To a human, the resume looks polished.

To the ATS, it looks fragmented.

I rebuilt hers in a clean Word document.
No columns.
No design tricks.
No formatting gymnastics.

Just strong, clearly structured content that reflected her depth of experience leading EMR systems and operations.

Within two weeks, she had three interviews.

Same background.
Same expertise (more job-targeted content).
Different file.

A few weeks later, she landed the exact type of position she had been targeting all along.

The market didn’t suddenly change.

Recruiters didn’t magically improve.

Her resume formatting did.

I share this because so many capable professionals internalize rejection that isn’t personal. They assume they aren’t competitive, when in reality their resume simply isn’t making it through the first gate.

If your resume can’t survive the software, it will never reach the human being on the other side.

And sometimes, the smallest structural fix can open the door you’ve been knocking on for months.