Can Electronic Eyes Read Your Resume?

By PETER D. WEDDLE

During the fifty years between the end of World War II and the middle of the 1990's, the techniques for finding a job scarcely changed at all. Basically, you wrote a paper resume, looked at the classified ads in your local newspaper, sent your resume through the mail to employers with job openings of interest to you and networked with friends and colleagues over lunch and the phone. It was a time consuming, laborious and often expensive process, but it usually worked.

Then, in the late 1980's, something happened. A little known network of research computers was transformed into a global "information superhighway," and the way organizations accomplished their work and conducted their business changed forever. Corporate communications, retail sales, inventory management, meeting planning, education and training, product design, team meetings and actual product development, all of it and more began to occur in cyberspace, on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Today, less than a decade later, millions and millions of organizations are on-line and using the Internet to conduct business and perform key functions.

It is a revolution in the world of work and, not surprisingly, it has also profoundly altered the way you find a job and manage your career. For the first time in fifty years, job searching has moved beyond the staid, old realm of paper resumes and the post office. It has been automated with advanced computer technology and burst onto the Internet, creating a whole new dimension for exploring employment opportunities and building a successful career. No less important, the scope of that change continues to grow broader and deeper with each passing day. Here's the evidence:

• A survey conducted in 1998 by Management Recruiters, International, an executive search firm based in Cleveland, found that 37% of companies now recruit on the Internet and World Wide Web, up from 26.5% just 18 months ago. More than 29% of companies now post jobs on their corporate web sites; a year ago, that number was too small to report.
• According to a report published by the American Management Association in 1997, 51% of all companies expect to be using the Internet to recruit by 1999.
• Similarly, the 1997 Forrester Report on Classifieds and Directories noted that employers are currently spending $48 million to recruit on the Internet, and projected that figure to grow almost ten fold -- to an astonishing $460 million dollars -- by 2002.
• And since results are the best indicator of what will stay and expand in business usage and what will disappear, consider this fact: A 1996 Bulletin to Management, published by The Bureau of National Affairs, reported that more than half of the companies it surveyed had filled at least one position with applicants sourced from the Internet. And that was over two years ago!

In short, to find the best opportunities in today's job market and build a successful career, you have to be able to connect with increasingly computer-dependent employers, in general, and with those which are using the Internet and the World Wide Web to recruit, in particular. And to do that, you must know how to write an internet resume.

The High-Tech Record

An internet resume is a high tech record of your work experience and qualifications that is designed for use in cyberspace. In other words, its format is designed to enable the resume to travel across the World Wide Web and the Internet without being distorted or worse, lost among the electrons. Similarly, its content is organized and composed to ensure that the resume (and your credentials) will not be overlooked when employers search the computerized databases that both they and employment web sites use to find qualified candidates for their open positions.

The internet resume also has an "electronic" variation. It enables your credentials to be transferred accurately from a traditional paper format to the digitized environment of computerized databases. Since a large and growing number of employers and employment web sites use such databases (more about that later), this version of the Internet Resume launches you into today's highly automated job market, even if you do not have access to the Internet or to a computer.

The internet resume, in contrast, is specifically designed for on-line use. It enables you to transfer your occupational background and expertise to those employers which maintain home pages on the Internet and to the thousands of employment web sites that are now in operation. The Internet Resume is specifically configured to take advantage of the speed and timeliness of on-line communications and delivers your employment qualifications over the Internet and the World Wide Web without garbling or losing key elements.

The Electronic Resume

The electronic version of an internet resume (which I will simply call an "electronic resume") is similar to a conventional resume in that it is a paper record of your occupational credentials and experience. However, its content and format are specifically designed to be compatible with a computer. That's important because computers are very single-minded. Unlike humans, they cannot make judgments or extrapolate from the information you provide. You cannot count on them to read between the lines or to assume something on your behalf. For a computer, either what you want to say is expressed in your resume in a way the computer can recognize or it's not. There's no sort ofs or maybes.

An electronic resume compensates for these limitations by organizing and presenting your qualifications in a "computer friendly" format. It is specifically designed to be compatible with the sophisticated technology that is growing ever more prevalent in the world of recruitment. This technology is used by employers, employment agencies and search firms and by employment web sites.

Employers: Human Resource Departments in organizations ranging from Fortune 100 corporations to much smaller companies use resume management systems to move the mountain of paper resumes they receive from employment candidates into a computer-controlled database where the resumes can be effectively stored and searched.

Employment agencies and search firms: To a lesser extent, these organizations are also turning to computerized databases to archive the candidate resumes they receive or collect in the course of their assignments so that they can be easily accessed and reviewed during future search work for employers.

Employment web sites: Ironically, many employment web sites, particularly those operated by professional associations, trade organizations and other affinity groups, also accept paper resumes from candidates and use resume management systems to build the databases which they then offer to employers on-line.

This growing use of advanced technology among employers and recruiters places new demands on your resume. Even in this new high environment, your resume remains your calling card in the job market. If it does its job effectively, it will persuasively showcase your credentials and open the door to an interview with those organizations offering opportunities for which you are qualified. To achieve that objective today, however, your resume must be pleasing and informative to both the eye and mind of human recruiters, and the software programs and computer systems that employers, employment agencies and search firms and employment web sites now use to manage resumes.

In other words, if you want to be visible in today's job market and considered for the best job openings, you have to have a resume that gets along with computers. That means the computer must be able to understand and accept your resume -- so that your credentials get stored in its database -- and the computer must be able to recognize the words you use to express those credentials -- so that it will pick your resume out from all of the others in the database when you are qualified for a particular position. If the computer hiccups on either of those two functions, your resume may be a work of art and you may be just the person an employer is seeking, but the connection will never be made.

The unique design of an electronic resume enables it to avoid such a disaster. It incorporates a number of relatively simple, but very important changes to both the format and content of a conventional paper resume. First, the information in an electronic resume is laid out so that it can be easily processed by an optical character recognition system -- that's a piece of technology that "reads" your resume and then inputs it into a computerized database where it is stored. If your resume can't get past this first step, it will almost certainly be stored in the other resume repository used by recruiters -- the waste basket. Second, an electronic resume expresses your employment credentials with the exact words and phrases that recruiters use to tell their computers which candidates to select in the database. Your qualifications must be conveyed with this special vocabulary or your resume will not match the computer's criteria and you will not be identified as a qualified candidate. An electronic resume integrates both of these components into an unique "computer friendly" design that can put the power of recruiters' own technology to work for you.

While having such a resume is critical to success in today's job market, it does not mean that you must now use two different resumes -- one for human recruiters and the other for their computers -- in your job search. Indeed, electronic resumes have a much broader application than their use in computerized resume management systems. Their format and content are also effective in the "paper environment" that still exists in many employers' human resources departments today.

This environment imposes its own set of demands on your resume. Budget cuts and decreased staff resources in human resources departments have dramatically curtailed the time and level of attention that can be devoted to candidate resumes. Indeed, when a paper resume is received by an employer, whether in response to a recruitment advertisement or from an interested job seeker, it is now usually reviewed by a support staff person -- often a receptionist or secretary -- who must rapidly sort through this pile of candidate resumes to identify those individuals who are most likely to be qualified for further consideration. A survey by U.S. News & World Report found that the "average" Fortune 500 company receives over 1,000 unsolicited resumes every week, so this task, while important, is also a huge burden. As a result, it is estimated that a resume now receives as little as 15 seconds attention when it reviewed. If your resume doesn't catch the eye of the staff person then, your window of opportunity is likely to slam shut forever.

The format of an electronic resume addresses this situation by getting the most important aspects of your credentials up front, where they are less likely to be overlooked. Unlike a conventional resume, it leads with your strength rather than burying your credentials in the dense text of the body of your resume, so that even an overworked staff person can't miss them. Hence, an electronic resume is a multi-purpose document that will serve you well in a number of different environments. These include:

• the computerized resume management systems that are increasingly used by large and small employers;
• the computerized databases of candidate resumes that a growing number of employment agencies and search firms now maintain;
• the computerized databases that are developed from paper resumes for use on-line by a significant number of employment web sites; and
• employers' human resources departments where recruiters and support staff conduct the initial evaluation of candidate resumes.

Whether it's single-minded computers or overworked staffers, an electronic resume has the right content in the right format to showcase your qualifications for today's employment opportunities.

The Internet Resume

An internet resume is designed to be transmitted from any computer to any other computer on the Internet or the World Wide Web. It uses a format called American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII (pronounced "askee") to present your qualifications in a way that is universally recognized by all computers, be they a PC or a Macintosh or Unix based, and by all word processing applications, whether the recipient is using Microsoft Word, Word Perfect or something else. In essence, the internet resume will effectively take your qualifications anywhere in the global, on-line job market you want to send them. There's just one catch.

Because it is designed to operate with all computers, ASCII has a simple, basic structure that lacks all of the stylistic embellishments typically included in the format of a resume. In other words, an internet resume has no bold lettering, no bullets, no italics, no tabs, no pictures or graphics and no special characters or symbols. It's simply plain, unadorned, generic text.

An internet resume looks like the body of an e-mail message or the content of a document on your word processing system when you save it as "text only." It is always aligned with the left margin and will only accept the letters, numbers and symbols you find on the keyboard of your computer. It will print out not in the font you use on your computer, but in the font set on your recipient's computer. And in most cases, it is limited to lines of about 60 characters because that is the line setting on many internet browsers and e-mail readers.

While not as eye-appealing as a conventional paper resume or even an electronic resume, this format is particularly versatile, enabling you to connect with on-line employment opportunities in a much more efficient and effective way. That's important because, as the data presented earlier confirm, the Internet is fast becoming a key resource for employers.

Typically, organizations use one or both of two approaches to Internet recruiting:

Employment web sites: A growing number of employers now look for candidates for their open positions by searching the resume databases of employment web sites. As noted above, some of these sites will accept a paper version of your resume which they will then transfer into their computerized database on-line. That takes time and the process is fraught with error (unless you use an electronic resume). Felicitously, a large and growing number of these sites, particularly, those which serve a broad spectrum of employers and occupational fields, now permit you to send your resume directly to their resume database on-line. In some cases, you simply paste a copy of your internet resume into a standard input form that is available at the site and in other cases, you paste a copy into the body of a standard e-mail message and send that to the site. In either case, your qualifications will be quickly and accurately transmitted to the web site so that employers will have access to them in the site's resume database.

Employer's on-line classified advertisements: A large and growing number of employers now post their employment opportunities on the Internet. Some have created their own web sites and post job openings there; others post them in the jobs databases of commercial employment web sites; still others post them in "newsgroups," which are bulletin boards maintained for and by persons with similar occupational interests (such as journalists or physical therapists) and in a small but growing number of cases, certain employers are using two or more of these approaches to publicize their openings in cyberspace. With an internet resume you can respond to these opportunities by simply pasting your record into an e-mail message and sending it to the advertising organization. As a result, you get your qualifications in front of recruiters without delay and long before a paper resume will arrive through the mail.

The internet resume enables you to send your qualifications over the Internet without garbling, or worse, destroying your message. Equally as important, the internet resume is designed with the right content. As with an electronic resume, most employers automatically store the internet resumes they receive in a computerized database. Hence, an internet resume also incorporates the same words and phrases that recruiters use to tell the site's computers which candidates to select in the database.

All-in-all, the internet resume gives you several important advantages:

• Speed: Your qualifications arrive in seconds or minutes rather than the days or even weeks it takes a paper resume to be delivered by mail. As a consequence, you can effectively respond to employers' time sensitive requirements and get your credentials in front of recruiters as soon as their openings are advertised.
• Accuracy: You can send your resume to any organization with a job opening anywhere in the world and be confident that it will be received in a recognizable and readable form, whatever computer system or word processing application the recipient is using.
• Cost savings: When you use an internet resume to transmit your credentials, you eliminate the cost of reproducing your resume on paper and the postage required to send it through the mail.
• Flexibility: Your internet resume is stored on your computer, so you can easily update it to reflect changes in your qualifications or tailor it to a specific job opportunity.
• Staying power: Once an employer receives your internet resume, it can be stored in a resume management system and considered over and over again for new position openings.
• Value-added credential: Your use of an internet resume demonstrates your knowledge of the Internet and its capabilities which is certain to be viewed positively by prospective employers in today's increasingly interactive world of commerce.

An internet resume enables you to connect with the growing number of employment opportunities now available in cyberspace and to capture the advantages of on-line communications. As with the electronic resume, the keys to its success are effective content and its unique format.

-- Excerpted from Internet Resumes: Take the Net to Your Next Job (Impact Publications, 1998) by Peter D. Weddle. Mr. Weddle also publishes WEDDLE'S, a newsletter about on-line recruiting.