Electronic Resume

The New Frontier

Increasingly, jobs are being advertised on the Internet. It is not uncommon to find an application form on the web page of a company seeking employees. You can download, fill in and post your resume, or even fill in the form on-line and submit it for scrutiny.

Currently, these advertisements are mainly for information technology professionals. All employers do not yet have web pages. However, the scene is changing fast. Non-IT jobs too are likely to be advertised in this manner soon as more and more organizations set up their own websites, be it for advertisement, E-commerce or for any other reason.

How does this trend affect you? As a job seeker, you should be aware of the rather special characteristics of Internet ready resume. Apart from the need to be concise, the formatting of your resume must undergo a change.

Increasingly, computers are being used for preliminary screening of electronically submitted resume before human beings see the selected ones. Unlike humans, computers work on a different set of rules for selecting eligible candidates. Your electronic resume must take this into account. We look at the specifics of impressing a computer in the sections that follow.

Computer-Friendly Resume Tips

What job hunters of the new millennium need to know is that computers read resume differently than people do. If you are applying to employers in the United States, this factor is already quite important. It will become so in India in course of time.

Those who do not know this fact risk having their resume crash and bum in the embers of the electronic age. How big is the risk? Studies do not agree, but about half of all mid-sized companies and virtually all the giants' in the US are already using job computers, to scan resume by the thousands and store their data for instant recall. Growing numbers of third-party ¦ recruiting firms and state public employment services in the Western world are also turning to this method to initially screen the resume they receive.

You can protect your resume from becoming a casualty of computer-friendly fire by following these suggestions:

Focus on Nouns, not Verbs

The computer searches resume for the "key words" it has been programmed to find. These are different from the action words that attract the attention of a human reading your resume. This is because the computer does a "blind search" by counting certain key words (which are nouns) and selecting those resume that contain a sufficient number of such key words. On the other hand, a human will evaluate your resume by reading complete sentences and understanding the meaning. Hence, a human will use action words (which are verbs) found in your resume as a guide. As you can see, the two systems work quite differently! The key words for an accountant, for example, might include "BCom accounting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, IT Amendments, and CA." If your scanned resume doesn't contain these key words, the computer passes it by, and you are a dead duck!

While there are no absolute content rules in computer resume searches, the majority of experts agree that the action verbs that work so well on paper resume lose their punch on scanned and computer-screened resume. Job computers rarely search for a match on verbs like "inspired, built, calibrated, represented, or verified." While your resume should include action verbs for sentence flow and human eyes, a computer just will not search for them.

Use More Key Words

The answer is to use more key words. The higher the numbers of key words you have in your resume the greater are your chances of leaving E-storage and popping up on the screen where humans can get a good look at you. The key words work as a kind of electronic bait to catch the computer's attention.

You have probably been advised by career counselors to seek trainee positions and acquire other work experiences, and to join student chapters of professional associations. They are right for many reasons; the newest is that such activities produce computer-recognised key words, improving the chances of your resume being selected by a screening computer.

Strike a Balance

As time goes by and more and more companies induct computers for preliminary resume screening, you will need to make your application computer-friendly, using some of the tips given here.

This is especially true if you apply to an overseas employer either by E-mail, or by filling in an on-line electronic application form. In either case, there is a very good chance that the preliminary screening will be entrusted to a computer.

However, after your resume has survived the combat with the computer, it will be exposed to human scrutiny. Therefore, all that we have discussed in the first 7 chapters of this book will still apply. So, you have to strike a balance between action verbs for humans and key words (nouns) for computers! Whoever said that writing a masterpiece was easy?