How to construct your resume in the electronic age.

When you mail off a resume, do you picture the person who opens the envelope sitting down to read it? In some organizations, those days are gone. Employers who get thousands of applications use a computer for the first cut.

When an unsolicited resume arrives at many large or mid-sized companies or recruiters, a clerk feeds the paper into a scanner. Scanned, emailed and Web-based resumes wind up in the same place, a searchable data base.

Electronic applicant tracking software matches resumes to job requirements by checking for job-specific keywords such as job titles, academic degrees, publications, honors, awards, certifications, languages and technical skills.

Ellen Heffernan is a partner in the Spelman & Johnson Group, an executive search firm specializing in higher education. Trying to go paperless, her firm uses tracking software as a mining and screening tool.

For instance, they might screen for keywords admissions, enrollment and Catholic if that's what a college wants. Then human judgment determines which resumes to show the client online or by email.

She doesn't advise rewriting your resume around buzzwords. "Your resume has to stand the test as it moves up in the process. Well-written, cogent, clear, with accurate and quantifiable data is still the norm," she told WIHE.

Nancy Archer Martin, practice leader for education and not-for-profit searches at J. Robert Scott, has a different experience. She works with search committees looking for presidents, VPs and provosts.