IF YOU POST IT, WILL THEY
COME?
Like taking out a "Position
Wanted" ad, you can post your resume in hundreds
of databases online with the
hope that you will be "discovered" by a great
employer and offered your dream
job. Yessiree, it's job search Utopia! By simply
placing your resume online,
you are guaranteed to be overwhelmed by the job offers
that will come pouring in
. . . Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is highly unlikely
that this will ever happen to
you unless you have the hottest, latest, greatest
combination of technology and
programming skills on the planet and have
three to five years' experience
with Java, ColdFusion, and XML. But that's not
to say that posting your resume
is not worth your effort.
Many people have posted their
resumes online and gotten calls that have
turned into successful new jobs.
Articles about such people have appeared in
National Business Employment
Weekly, and friends who are also working on the
Internet job search even send
us accounts that they have witnessed, but these
cases are a small percentage
of all those who are posting. In his book Job-
Hunting on the Internet
(2nd ed.. Ten Speed Press, 1999), Richard Bolles gives
this activity an effectiveness
rating of less than one-half of l percent, if you are
not seeking a computer-related
job, and 20 percent if you are. However, he goes
on to state that if he were job
hunting, he would post his resume online, but then
he would get right back to his
other activities of networking, researching, and
reviewing job leads. We agree
with him 100 percent. No, posting your resume
online is not the best way to
find a job, but yes, we want to encourage you to
post your resume. It's one of
the four primary job search activities, so you
should do it, but it should not
be where you concentrate most of your effort.
Now that we've gone through the
bad and the ugly, let's talk about the "good"
aspect of this job search activity.
THE MYTH ABOUT THE INTERNET
RESUME
Many people think that with the
advancement of resume-management systems
and keyword searching on the
Internet, you need a different resume from the
one you have prepared to mail
to contacts. This is not true!
When done correctly, your well-written,
well-prepared resume will contain all
of the necessary keywords to
attract attention whether it is being read by a
hiring manager, scanned and searched
in a management system such as
Resumix, or indexed in an Internet
database.
You still need only one resume,
but now you should have it in three forms:
1. The designed version-with
bulleted lists, bold and italicized text, and
other highlights, ready to
send to contacts through the mail
2. The scannable version-no
bullets, bold, italics, or other design highlights
written in a standard font
and printed on white paper to send to employers'
who use scanning systems
3. The e-mail version-a
plain-text file you keep on a diskette for e-mailing to
prospective employers, posting
in resume databases, or cutting-and-pasting
into forms for other databases
