Career insights and stories

InDesign produces the cleanest ATS-safe PDFs of any design tool. Adobe charges $240/year for it. The 3 cases worth paying, the gotchas, when to skip it.

Apache OpenOffice has been on life support since 2015. The 5-minute switch to LibreOffice, the templates that work in both, and why your old .odt files don't need to change.

LibreOffice is one of the cleanest ATS-export tools available. The real problem is template scarcity. 5 worth using, the DOCX gotcha, when to switch to Google Docs.

Figma's native PDF export converts text to vector outlines. ATS reads the file as blank. The plugin fix, when designers should use Figma anyway, when not.

PowerPoint stores resume text as separate slide objects. ATS reads them in creation order, not visual order. The 3 fixes, when it's defensible, when not.

Apple Pages ships 9 free resume templates. Only a few survive ATS parsing intact. Which ones to use, the ligature setting that breaks the rest, and the export trick that fixes everything.

70% of skills used in most jobs will change by 2030 (LinkedIn). Companies run skill gap analyses to deny raises. Do it on yourself every 6 months to find your next $20K job.

LaTeX makes the prettiest resume in the stack. It also fails half of ATS parsers. 5 free templates (Jake's, Awesome-CV, Deedy, ModernCV, Europass) compared, Overleaf workflow, the honest fix.

74% of U.S. districts can't fill their teaching openings (NCES). Traditional districts average 3.3 applicants per job. You have leverage. Template + 5 examples by situation.

Hospitals have 189K RN openings a year (BLS) and still screen out half the applicants. The cover letter decides which half. Full template + 5 examples by situation.

87% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates (Jobvite). Either your profile is findable, or you're invisible. Headlines, summaries, keywords, and DM templates that work.