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Updated June 8, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Admitted by Soundarya Balasubramani. Written by an Ivy League graduate from India, this is the proven guide for students worldwide looking to pursue undergraduate or graduate study abroad in the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Purchase for instant access to the guide and other exclusive resources—including sample SOPs, sample resumes, scholarship lists, and a private community with other readers.
Both the formats have their pros and cons. A one-column resume is more ATS-friendly (which we’ll get to soon), suffers less distortion when converted into a PDF, and is considered the more acceptable format. However, it is not optimized for space, contains long sentences, and is not appealing to the eye. The two-column resume is newer and more reading-friendly. It lets you separate the less space-consuming sections such as Education and Skills from the more verbose Experience sections. However, it is less likely to be ATS compatible.
An applicant tracking system (or ATS) is a tool used by companies, and more specifically recruiters, to manage the thousands of resumes that come into their pipeline, by parsing the resume content of resumes for relevant keywords followed by sorting and ranking them into different categories.*
If you were applying for a data science role that specifically states that you need a background in Python, R, and machine learning, it’s pretty obvious that the recruiter would only want to look at the resumes that had them. However, instead of having to skim through all of them manually, they let the software do its magic, which then provides them with a ranking of applicants (based on a plethora of indicators).