What AI Sees When It Reads Your Resume

When you send in a resume, there’s a good chance a human may not be the first to review it. Recruiting software has been parsing resumes for years, and AI is now giving employers more ways to sort through candidates and match backgrounds to an open role. According to SHRM’s 2025 Talent Trends research, 44% of organizations using AI in recruiting use it for resume screening. 

For candidates, that raises an obvious question. What is the technology looking for? 

There isn’t one universal formula, and employers don’t all use the same systems. Still, most resume-screening tools are trying to pull the same basic pieces off the page: your work history, the roles you’ve held, the skills you list, and how much experience backs them up. If that information is buried, vague, or hard to interpret, you’re making the system work harder than it needs to. 

Formatting a resume the system can read 

This is one place where getting too creative can work against you. 

A heavily designed resume may look great on your screen but become much less useful once software tries to break it into sections. Tables, graphics, text boxes, and unusual layouts can all complicate parsing in some systems. 

You don’t have to hand in a wall of black text. Keep the basic structure recognizable, with skills and dates easy to find and headings that look like ones people have actually seen before. For most IT candidates, the substance of the resume is going to do far more work than an elaborate design anyway. 

Turning a list of technologies into real experience 

IT resumes can turn into alphabet soup pretty quickly. Terms like AWS, Azure, SQL, Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, ServiceNow are useful, since they tell the system what technologies are associated with your background. They become problematic when the resume stops there. 

Say you list AWS and Terraform in your skills section. That’s fine, but where did you use them? 

“Experienced with AWS and Terraform” tells a recruiter very little. “Built AWS infrastructure with Terraform to support application deployments” gives them something to work with. 

It also gives recruiting software more context around the skill. Instead of seeing Terraform as a standalone keyword, it can connect it to infrastructure work and your actual experience. The same idea applies to nearly every technical skill on a resume. If something is important enough to list, find a natural place to show what you did with it. 

Matching your resume to the posting’s language 

This sounds obvious, yet it’s one of the easiest steps to skip when you’re applying to several jobs at once. 

Look at the words the employer uses to describe the work. If the job calls for “identity and access management” and you’ve done IAM work, make sure your resume says so. If the posting names Kubernetes and your resume only refers broadly to container orchestration, there may be a reason to get more specific. 

You don’t need to mirror every line of the job description, and you definitely don’t need to stuff the same term into five different bullets. Use the employer’s terminology where it accurately matches your experience. 

A recruiter looking for a network engineer shouldn’t have to read halfway down the page before realizing you’ve spent the last four years doing network engineering. 

Replacing vague bullets with specific ones 

AI tools are getting better at connecting related terms and matching experience to job requirements. Specific bullets are still preferable to vague ones. 

“Supported cloud systems.” 

“Helped maintain databases.” 

Both could describe legitimate IT experience, but neither tells you very much. Which cloud? What kind of systems, and how large was the environment? You don’t need a metric attached to every line, but you need enough for someone to understand what you were responsible for. 

Specific language helps on both ends of the process. Software gets more to work with, and recruiters get a clearer picture of what you can do. 

Avoiding the keyword-stuffing trap 

Once people hear that AI is involved in screening, the temptation is to build a resume entirely around keywords. The result is often a document that technically contains everything and somehow says very little. 

There’s no magic keyword density to hit and no single ATS score every employer is chasing. Getting past an automated screen doesn’t count for much if the resume that reaches the recruiter afterward is awkward, repetitive, or hard to follow. 

Your resume still needs to sound like your career. Keep the relevant skills easy to spot, name the technologies you’ve worked with, and show where you used them. 

Judge connects IT professionals with employers who are looking for exactly that kind of specific, verifiable experience. Browse open roles with Judge and see where your background fits.