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Featured Article
Getting Your Resume Ready for Today's Recruiting Realities
May 30, 2003
A recent survey of employers who recruit on-campus revealed
that most have a strong preference for resumes that are electronically
submitted; many indicated that it was the only way they would accept
them.
Whether you submit your resume electronically or it is scanned
upon arrival, organizations increasingly rely on applicant tracking
systems to manage their recruiting processes. If your resume doesn't
scan well, the employer is faced with trying to "clean it up"
and make it readable, which can be costly and time consuming.
Tips for electronically submitting your resume
On the employer website:
Employers' websites will often give you specific instructions
on how to submit your resume electronically; be sure to carefully
read their guidelines. Typically, you would submit portions of
your resume into a series of text boxes. One of the easiest ways
to prepare your resume for submission is to:
1) save your Word document in Notepad or as a "Text Only
(*.txt)" document
2) left justify, have white space around information, use asterisks
instead of bullets
3) make sure it is formatted so the reader can easily find
information
4) then cut and paste segments into the text boxes on the employer's
website.
Via email:
Most employers said they strongly prefer that you send your resume
as an attachment because it is easier to file and looks better
when copied. Most preferred it as a Word document.
Tips for submitting a scannable resume
The goal of preparing a scannable resume is to produce a clear
clean copy so the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software can
recognize every letter.
Paper: use good quality paper, white or light shade
for good contrast, and no staples. Print on one side only and
don't fold.
Font: use sans serif family fonts, e.g., Arial,
Tacoma, Optima, Helvetica, and choose font size 10-14. Otherwise,
there are too many opportunities for letters to appear connected
to each other, making words unreadable.
Bold, underline, italics: minimize the use of bullets,
bolding, and underlining or italics; otherwise, your resume could
become unreadable. Make sure individual letters and underlining
do not touch. Use of continuous periods (....……) will
appear unreadable. Also, have a space between slashes (CS / EE)
to avoid the slash touching a letter.
Format: use a standard paragraph format, no columns,
and avoid headers and footers.
Getting "hits"
Rodney Lam, who manages the Employment Response Center at Hewlett
Packard, suggests applying for individual job requisitions and avoiding
spamming specific employers' job sites; don't apply for any and
all jobs on an employer's site thinking one of your resumes has
to get noticed. It is better to analyze job descriptions and apply
for those for which you are qualified. To get noticed, customize
your resume to the job by having an appropriate objective and showcase
those aspects of your background that demonstrate you have the skills,
qualities, and knowledge employers are seeking. Use of keywords
is important; for example, if the job description asks for someone
to work on "budgets," "system integration,"
and "forecasting," and in your work or school experiences
you have this experience, be sure to use those exact words on your
resume.
Make sure you use keywords to define your skills, experience, education,
and areas of knowledge. Be specific and use concrete words, e.g.,"managed
a team of software engineers" rather than "responsible
for managing, training,..." It is OK to use jargon and acronyms
specific to a particular field or industry, but avoid abbreviations.
Don't worry about length; resumes can be more than one page.
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