Building a Better Resume
This post originally appeared on BetterProjects.net on June 11, 2010.
One of the most frustrating activities that I’ve ever had to do in my professional career is to make up a quality resume. Sure, anyone can lay out a listing of BA activities they have performed in a chronological format, but I feel that just doesn’t do our experience justice when you look down at those printed words on a page. When I was between jobs a few years ago, I spent a frustrating afternoon looking for a new resume template to use that would show off my abilities to potential employers. I came up empty, eventually modifying a stock template from Microsoft Word. It obviously worked because 8 weeks after being laid off I was back in a new job, but the experience always left me wondering why that was the only option.Wonder no more. If I had thought of this during those 2 months I was unemployed, I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting a new job. Instead, I would have worked on creating a site that can do what DoYouBuzz.com does so easily… share your resume with the world.
There are a few things I really like about this site that other places don’t do. Sure, you can use LinkedIn, Facebook or even your own website to post your work history, but this site does it all so much better. Here are a few things I really like about it:
- Easily customize your resume layout to something that fits you and the job you’re going for. As project people, we’re generally thought of to be technology savvy, so a site like this, which can produce great results in a short period of time, makes us look good.
- Embedding. I have my own website, where I spent way too much time putting together a version of my resume. Because I can embed directly from DoYouBuzz, I can update my information in a structured format and those changes automatically appear on my website, too.
- Security. You can choose, if you want to, who can see your information and what information they can see. Not only can you keep out unwanted individuals from seeing your resume but you can choose to have all inquiries forwarded to you without the recruiter ever seeing your actual contact information.
- Search. If you haven’t searched for yourself online, you should do so often. One of the great things about a site like this is that it can actually help anyone looking for you, and recruiters will look for you, find a better quality result faster.
- Statistics. This one really made my sit up and pay attention. I like knowing who and how often someone is looking at my information. One of the things that I found most frustrating about paper resumes is that you have no idea if anyone is even looking at them or not. DoYouBuzz provides you statistics on how many times your resume has been viewed and soon will tell you more such as where the views are coming from and how long they looked at each page.
This post might have sounded like one huge plug for a service, but I promise you its not a commercial. I found the site intriguing and hope you all find it so as well. Even though I’m not in the job market right now, I am considering moving my resume information over to DoYouBuzz so I am ready if I ever do need it quickly.
So what about you? What experiences have all of you had with electronic resumes? Does anyone have a story of something that worked well for them?