See Resume from the Eyes of an ATS

I am looking for a new job these days. While working on the resume, the general advice is not to use icons in the resume, because icons might not be parsed correctly. But I do want to use icons in the resume.

I thought, why not look at the resume the way a parser would? This way, I could understand why icons might be a problem.

With some googling, I found about pdftotext command, which can extract text from PDF documents.

After parsing the PDF, the icons came up as gibberish.

 www.chaitanyavaru.com
ï linkedin.com/in/chaitanya-varu

In LaTeX, I was using icons as below.

\faIcon{laptop}\href{https://www.chaitanyavaru.com}{www.chaitanyavaru.com}

\faIcon{linkedin}\href{https://linkedin.com}{linkedin.com/in/chaitanya-varu}

To resolve this, I used accsupp package to add accessibility text for the icons.

\BeginAccSupp{ActualText={Website: }}\faIcon{laptop}\EndAccSupp{}
  \href{https://www.chaitanyavaru.com}{www.chaitanyavaru.com}

\BeginAccSupp{ActualText={LinkedIn: }}\faIcon{linkedin}\EndAccSupp{}
  \href{https://linkedin.com}{linkedin.com/in/chaitanya-varu}

Now when the parser comes across the icons, it knows what text to extract in place of icon. With this, icons were parsed correctly without any gibberish.

Website: www.chaitanyavaru.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chaitanya-varu

Conclusion

This may not be valid for every application tracking system (ATS), but it gives me a way to check what text is actually extracted from my resume.

The general advice is to avoid icons because they might not be parsed correctly. In my case, I could keep the icons by adding accessibility text for them.

This experiment helped me get to the underlying reason behind the general advice, instead of just following it.