Electronic Resume Writing Tips

from High Technology Careers Magazine
by Cynthia Chin-Lee

It's no longer enough to have a resume on paper and a resume on your own Web site. These days savvy job hunters also have a third resume: the online resume.

An online resume is specifically designed for online transmission (by electronic mail) and for computer scanning. You replace the fancy fonts and graphics of your typeset or desktop-published version with simple ASCII text. The online resume is gaining in popularity because so many recruiters and large companies routinely scan resumes. You may not know it, but when you send your resume (the paper one) to a company, no human in the typical human resources department reads it. Instead, a staff member scans the resume, using software
designed for that purpose. While a company may keep your paper resume on file, it will probably rate you, categorize you, and decide how to deal with you based on how the software scanned your resume into its database. The prevalence of scanning software makes it important that you know how to design the online resume. Joe Hnilo of Resumix, a Sunnyvale firm, said that "new scanning technology means new opportunities for job hunters. By scanning a person's resume and keeping this information in a database, a company can keep the information active for years and consider the person for jobs he or she may not have even applied for."

According to Hnilo, your resume is scanned into the computer as an image. Then optical character recognition (OCR) software looks at the image and distinguishes every letter and number to create a text (ASCII) file. Artificial intelligence "" the file and uses the important information (such as name, address, skills, education, and years of experience) to enter a record of you in a database. Resumix develops software for resume scanning, and its customers include Tellabs, the Vanguard Group, Cornell University, and UPS. However, scanned resumes may have a down side for job hunters. Roger Firestone (www.ccsf.caltech.edu/~rfire/), a computer scientist in the Washington, D.C. area, feels the use of automated resume retrieval is unsound, particularly for "higher level positions requiring the ability to transfer knowledge or positions that cannot easily be described in a few simple key words." Firestone admitted that scanned resumes might work if a company wants "very specific skills, such as C++ programming or familiarity with a particular set of
products."

Anthony Peeters of San Francisco Systems (www.sfsys.com/sfsys), a recruiting firm, said that the format of your online resume is very important. He noted that "more and more recruiting efforts are skill-set oriented, and this should be reflected in the beginning of the resume in very specific terms". Peeters cited a growing trend at online resume Web sites. Sites such as Intellimatch (www.intellimatch.com) use a survey to get a detailed inventory of skills from the prospective candidate. Peeters tells job hunters they need to design their online resume to emphasize skills.

Firestone shared tips for making your online resume easier to read. "Eliminate all formatting and put your resume on individual sheets of paper rather than a single two-sided sheet." For instance, some scanners can't handle bold type, underlining, or changes in font size. Hnilo added that a laser-printed resume works best, and she ad-vised using standard typefaces (like Helvetica, Courier, Optima, Times Roman, and Palatino) in a font size of 10 to 14 points."Avoid vertical or horizontal lines, graphics, or boxes," Hnilo said.

Job hunter Dave Weir (www.pluggedin.org/davidweir/), a mobile computing specialist, said he added "several industry buzzwords" to his resume "that might help trigger a 'hit.'" Weir has sent his online resume to recruiters and companies by electronic mail, and the resume has gotten him jobs.

Jack Godwin, a technical writer in San Jose, also sent his online resume to a recruiter by electronic mail. That is how he found his latest job at Sybase. Godwin said, "Text resumes sent via e-mail are an effective way to quickly get your information into the hands of the hiring manager" While "pretty" desktop-published resumes are nice, Godwin noted that "graphic design issues are not a primary concern to hiring managers; however a well-organized resume illustrates the organization of your thoughts".

Cynthia Chin-Lee (www.expertcenter.com/members/cchinlee) speaks on "Untangling the Web" and "Networking: the Magic of Connections."; She is the author of It's Who You Know (Pfeiffer/Jossey-Bass) and Almond Cookies and Dragon Well Tea.