|
What's included in this Program:
7: Digital Resumes
Last Update: 3-2-03
If you care about the privacy of your identity you will want to pay attention here.
The resume rules have changed and are changing as you read this. Over 80 % of the nation's largest companies collect, process and store resume information digitally, whether by scanning printed resumes (a declining practice) with OCR software, by requesting that all new resumes are sent or entered digitally, by accessing fee based resume data banks, or by receiving them as referrals by recruiters and others. An interviewer you meet at a job fair to whom you email a resume will probably enter it into the company's database.
Therefore not only is it essential to learn the basics of how to construct an effective digital resume and deliver it, it is also VERY IMPORTANT to know that when you are using public resume services and other digital senders and recipients (individual employers are a non public exception), much of your information - as confidential and revealing as a resume can be- is floating around in perhaps hundreds of databases over which you have no control. Also, there is no promise that your own employer will not have access to your identity and know how and where you are looking.
The Resume Kit will prepare you for mastering digital resumes. You should assume that whatever documents you send for potential employment will be digitized into ASCII at some point for search and retrieval purposes. This means that formatting, bolds, underlines, tabs, some bullets, tables and certain typefaces will not survive in the attractive format you planned for personal perusal. Sending a well-formatted resume in Word as an attachment to an email is a good idea especially if you are sending it to a person by name, because you could get the opportunity to have it read by a human (a rare gift in this endeavor today). You might also want to show your savvy by sending an ASCII version in addition so that is what will be entered for retrieval. The Resume Kit helps you produce the best possible text versions of your resume for digital use as well as to preserve the value of your presentation resume. We also discuss how to digitize your cover letter and see that it is not separated from your resume.
It is essential to make sure your key marketable qualities and capabilities are in the form of key words and phrases and organized so a search engine will recognize them. Keyword indexes, boxes and summaries are among your choices.
The Resume Kit describes and give examples of several digital styles,
key wording, methods for secure, individual distribution and more.
|
