Unfortunately, the rules of the game have changed, and if you want to compete in bigger ponds, you'll have to adjust the way you present your dossier of experience. In the High Tech age, state-of-the-art is electronic, not fashion.
High power, muscle résumés come in three formats nowadays, all focusing on personal and cybernetic. They are:
The Keyword Résumé The Home Page or WWW Résumé -- with or without digitized photo The Video Résumé
This time we'll talk about the Keyword Résumé, saving Web and Video versions for future columns.
The Keyword Résumé, as the name suggests, is loaded with key or essential words that your friendliest computer can scan and categorize. Why keywords? Smart managers realize that they cannot possibly keep up with the avalanche of résumés hitting the mail these days. Hooking up technical know-how with an optical character recognition (OCR) device makes it incredibly easy for a computer to "read" all about you. Besides, the computer makes decisions that would take humans immense amounts of time -- we're talking whether to stash your résumé in an appropriate data file, rank you above or below qualified others, or in short, reject you cold. Acting like an electronic traffic cop, the smart machine decides whether a human should take a look at you -- eventually.
If you have already perfected the ideal paper version of your résumé, you may initially resist changing the way your statement of experience works for you. Yet if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you'll have to take a proactive approach to planning, writing, and submitting an electronic version. Why? Because big business is already moving to optically scanned résumés. Resumix, a California supplier of optical scanning software, has a client list that includes the White House, General Motors, Nike, UCLA, Bell Atlantic, United Parcel Service, and Motorola. It will be just a matter of time before mid-size companies follow suit.
If it makes sense to have two versions of your résumé available, one for the OCR reader and the other for humans, congratulate yourself. You're beginning to understand that although old habits die hard, computerization changes the way we do things, and in the end, technical power is a much greater influence on our lives than we ever dreamed.
When you start developing your state-of-the-art electronic résumé, realize that the old rules for creating résumés can hurt you. Under the old rules, you relied heavily on eye-catching, cleverly-written, and active verbiage -- words like these: consulted, created, expanded, launched, implemented, designed. Action verbs are fine for paper résumés, but the kiss of death for scanned ones.
What counts in the Keyword Résumé? You're gonna be surprised. Key words tend to be nouns or noun phrases that reflect job duties. For example: Total Quality Management, UNIX, Operations Manager, Branch Administrator, Chief Operating Officer, Finance. The keyword summary, listed near the top of your résumé is the most important section, for it is via these key words that the computer sorts your capabilities, accepting you, ranking you, or rejecting you.
Keyword formats are also different from standard résumé formats. Electronic scanning experts say that to have a "clean" scan occur, you must modify your format so that the computer doesn't misread characters. A clean scan requires that you:
Use only white paper and black ink. Avoid designer fonts but use fonts with distinctive edges to each character. Examples are: Times Roman, Helvetica, Arial, Futura, Univers, Optima, Courier, Palatino, ITC Bookman, and New Century SchoolBook Use a font size of 10 to 14 points. Avoid using italics, script, and underlined passages. Use adequate margins of at least ˝ inch on all sides. Avoid boxes, graphics, or unusual configurations Avoid abbreviations except those that are acceptable in the engineering/technical fields such as CAD/CAM and IBM.
Here are some other tips for creating effective keyword résumés. Be sure to:
Front-load the key words. In other words, place your summary of keywords near the beginning of the document. There are four reasons for doing so:
If your résumé is long, the human who feeds it to the OCR may decide to include only the first one or two pages. Your keywords at the top of the first page may help to qualify you for an interview.
Many automated systems store your résumé by keyword only or by extracted summary, not by full-text. If this is the case, the sentence structure and appearance of your résumé will not count, but the list of keywords near the beginning will.
Starting your résumé with a keyword summary helps you get your priorities straight so that the rest of your electronic résumé is organized accordingly.
Some OCRs stop reading after a certain number of lines - say 75. That's why it's best to put your keywords and dates, company names, and job titles near the front.
Use lots of white space. Computers like white space for they recognize that one topic has ended and another has started. (Clean Scan Plan!)
Determine length by the following scale: New graduates: One page Most of us: One to two pages Senior Execs: Two to three pages
How quickly can you expect success from your e-resume? Gerry Bourguignon, Training Coordinator for SoftQuad, Inc., says, "Believe it or not, I got the response from my present employer the same day I posted." You should be so lucky!
Get more help for creating your high tech (muscle) keyword résumé from these resources:
ELECTRONIC RÉSUMÉ REVOLUTION and ELECTRONIC JOB SEARCH REVOLUTION by Joyce Lain Kennedy and Thomas J. Morrow (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
THE ON-LINE JOB SEARCH COMPANION by James C. Gonyea, president of Help Wanted-USA on America Online. (McGraw-Hill). Email address is: CareerDoc@AOL.com.
Deborah H. Wilson, career consultant, specializing in writing key word résumés. Email address: CareerPro2@AOL.com.
Copyright © 1995 Grace Smith, Ph.D. for InfoMedia
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