August 12, 1999
LIBRARY / JOB-HUNTING SOFTWARE
Resumes That Meet Digital Demands
By MICHELLE TULLIER and MICHAEL GAZELLE
hen
a management consultant arrived for his interview with a Big Five accounting firm, he was appalled to
find that all the bullet points on the
résumé he had sent by E-mail had
morphed into little pencil symbols
when the interviewer printed out the
document. The candidate had to
waste the first few minutes of the
meeting explaining that what the hiring manager held in his hand was the
result of some sort of technical
glitch, not a lack of professionalism.
How was this job seeker to know
that his carefully worded job descriptions would go from impressive
to infantile with the click of a Send
button? How can any job seeker
know what happens to a résumé
when it leaves the personal computer nest and ventures into the increasingly electronic world of hiring?
Many employers now scan, download, upload, keyword-search and
bank résumés they receive, which
means that applicants must take
special care to draft documents
whose content and format can be
read by all sorts of digital systems. A
résumé lacking key industry-specific
jargon will not pop up on the screens
of hiring managers when they search
for suitable candidates in their companies' staffing databases. And the
formatting flourishes common in
print résumés, like boldfacing, italicizing and centering, can turn text
into gobbledygook when a scanner
gets hold of it. (Scanners and applicant databases thrive on a bland diet
of plain, left-justified text.)
About the only thing that has
stayed the same is that many résumés still get tossed into the proverbial circular file; only now that file is
more likely to be a Recycle Bin icon
or an E-mail delete button.
In addition to keeping up with technological changes, résumés must
keep pace with changes in employment itself. Career changers, downsized employees and portfolio workers (people with patchwork careers
consisting of various freelance, consulting and contract assignments)
are more the norm these days than
are job seekers with straightforward
career histories. The old chronological résumé built around dates of employment and job titles (known in the
career counseling trade as the obituary style) doesn't cut it when you're
trying to streamline a convoluted
work history or sell a prospective
employer on your transferable skills
and potential.
If you're looking for a job now, you
have to assess your skills and talents, catalogue your accomplishments, anticipate the employer's
needs and choose among a dizzying
array of layouts and fonts that will
best showcase what you have to offer. Then, to get the overall format
right, you have to determine whether
your résumé will be read digitally in
the electronic sense or digitally in
the piece-of-paper-held-in-human-fingers sense.
If all of that sounds like more than
you care to handle on your own, consider using a résumé software package to walk you step by step through
the writing and designing processes.
Michelle Tullier is the author of the
""Unofficial Guide to Acing the Inter
view"" (Macmillan, 1999) and writes
about careers for Monster.com. Michael Gazelle is a desktop publisher
at the Merrill Corporation in New
York City.