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A Gamer’s Primer to Resume Preparation, 2026 Edition

It has been eight years since I wrote my original post [A Gamer’s Primer to Practically Dealing with Job Loss]. The core principles remain the same, but the practical elements have changed significantly since. The job-seeking world has changed in many ways, so it is incredibly important that we recognize the new gatekeepers in the process and optimize to bypass them.

The Strat is Stack Ranking Keywords

The vast majority of companies out there use an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to track candidates before a human ever reads a single word on the resume. This isn’t actually a bot or AI - it’s more of a glorified spreadsheet than anything else. However, ATS often do filtering in order to present candidates to the recruiters in a ranked order, primarily by density of key words. Because the ATS isn’t a bot or AI, the filtering is often very simple and precise, meaning that words that don’t match the filter exactly will be ignored. In most job openings that get a lot of applicants, the candidates are often stack ranked, meaning those with more keyword hits are put at the top and those who lack them are pushed to the bottom.

This is the difference here - if you submit an application to a company and never receives a response at all (rejection or not), it is likely that they received it and your resume is at the bottom of the pile because of the stack ranking. It’s there, it’s just buried so deep no human will ever see it. If you do receive a rejection email, it means somebody (or some thing) checked and decided not to (more on this later).

ATS Optimization Trumps Creative Formatting

Many companies have varying versions of ATS which also means that many of them are old and out of date. A job seeker’s best bet is to optimize for the min spec ATS, because an old system can still push you to the bottom of the pile just as easily as a new one. Thus, a pretty and well-designed resume that is intuitive and easy to read for a human can get bottomed immediately because the ATS has trouble parsing the resume formatting. In order to get around this, we must make our resume very simple and easy to read. The ATS scans your resume and extracts your relevant information into a bunch of fields for the recruiter to peruse. We want to optimize that process. Here are my suggestions for your resume build:

Single column format only, no tables, no additional columns. The ATS typically read left to right, so columns confuse them.
Use a simple sans serif font - Garamond, Calibri, Arial, whatever. ATS have no sense of beauty and may reject the resume if they can’t parse the font. Throw out anything that might fail OCR.
ATS are built to read .doc, .docx or .pdf file formats. Stick to those. If you use a .pdf, run it through an OCR scanner for legibility to make sure it can be read. If it can’t be read, your resume will get auto-rejected as a bad submission.
Remove all graphics, graphs, icons, pictures, etc. from your resume. The ATS can’t read them and the images may break the parsing process.
Use standard headings like Experience, Skills, and Education. Don’t be creative or clever, it’s wasted on the ATS. Save it for the interview.
If you ever use a term that is often shortened to an acronym, write out the full term at least once and then put the acronym in parentheses right after it, e.g. “PlayStation Network (PSN)”. This maximizes the chances that the bot will recognize and flag the keyword as a match.
The ATS compares your resume directly to the job description. Try to incorporate the specific wording from the JD into your resume… but not too many of them (see below). The sweet spot seems to be around 60-80% of the keywords in the job description. That said, if you have >80% of the keywords organically, that’s ok - the ultimate arbiter of this is still a human recruiter, who will look at the top stack-ranked candidates. If you can do the work, that should show through. The >80% check is mostly to cull those gaming the system by throwing as many keywords at the ATS as possible.
Required skills from the job description are weighted more heavily by the bots than the Preferred skills. Address the Required skills as much as you can.
Keyword density is important here - if the important keywords show up more often in your resume, that can push your resume higher in the stack ranking.
Exact matching is important for the stack ranking. This also includes terms like job title in addition to required skills, preferred skills, and so on. Thus, if you’re applying for an Associate Systems Designer position and your resume has “Junior Game Designer” on it, you may want to adjust that to “Associate Systems Designer” instead for a few additional stack ranking points even if it wasn’t the exact title you had. No one at your former employer will argue about semantics like this.

Recruiters Hate Bots Too

Human recruiters will often reject AI-generated resumes outright. After reading a few hundred/thousand of them, they’ve started noticing the common patterns and auto-rejecting them. Optimize your resume build by scrubbing your resume of any obvious AI-generated content. Specifically:

Nuke any common “AI Speak” words in your resume like “spearheaded”, “results-driven”, “leveraged”, and so on.
Include specifics and details that an AI wouldn’t be able to make on its own. “Scripted Helicopter Boss Fight with multiple damage-gated phases and mode-specific animated death sequence” instead of “Scripted helicopter boss fight”
Recruiters hate keyword soup search optimization, where applicants try to hide a huge bunch of keywords hidden in tiny white font. That stuff will show up in a copy/paste and they’ll almost always reject immediately.

We’re Trying to Optimize For Two Different Sets of Criteria

Basically, we want to get to the top of the ATS stack ranking so that we can get seen and our resume should still pass the “4:30pm Friday” test where a recruiter can see your resume just before the weekend and still be impressed enough to care and set it aside.

Common Response Parsing

Candidates typically get one of two results from applying:

Radio silence. This usually means that your application was accepted and is being stack ranked by the ATS. If you don’t get a call within a few weeks, you can assume that the ATS has bottomed your resume or that the job has been filled. Move on.
Instant rejection email. This often happens if the ATS can’t read your resume at all - it considers it a bad application and throws it out. If the ATS can read your resume, this usually doesn’t happen because of qualifications and skills for a job, but can still trigger if your application fails some other mandatory requirement. These requirements are things like visa sponsorship, (re)location, salary expectations, certification/licensing, etc. Another possibility is that the job you are applying for has already been filled, causing the ATS to send out auto-rejections since the req is closed.

We don’t need to win them all, we only need to win once

It’s important to remember that we only need one win when it comes to job hunting, not many. In a situation much like dating, a lot comes down to luck, timing, and what all parties involved are looking for. We have very little control over the first two (and should try not to worry about it), so we should focus on the things we can control - our resume, our presentation of ourselves, and putting our best foot forward. Do the best you can, optimize the best you can, and avoid unforced errors as best you can. It’s a game of incremental advantage. If you can improve your approach, it will aggregate into a better overall chance as you take more shots on goal. Good luck. I’m rooting for you.

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