August 12, 1999

LIBRARY / JOB-HUNTING SOFTWARE

Resumes That Meet Digital Demands

By MICHELLE TULLIER and MICHAEL GAZELLE

When 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.



Angel Franco/The New York Times
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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.




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