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Before you start to create your resume it's important to figure out who
your target audience is. It's like any other design project.
In this case your target audience would be your prospective employer and
it might be a self-promotional piece. A place where people can find out about you
and what you're doing, because it will help your career.
Historically the resume has just been a printed document.
Something you put on linen paper, but today there are many, many ways to
distribute or get your resume out there to the prospective employer or
to that target audience. A very common method these days that's easy
for the HR people is to simply paste your resume inside the body of an email.
They don't want to read an attachment. They don't want to open up any PDFs or
docs or take the time. Remember HR people are very, very busy, busy
people and sometimes will get anywhere from 100 to 200 applications per
day. When you're looking for a job, make sure you
follow the exact instructions of HR. Many, many jobs these days are asking for
the resume in the body of the message. A second way is to actually have online presence.
There's two ways that you can do this. There are actually Web hosting companies that
will host your online resume and take care of all the management of that and
try to connect you to employers and also protect you from getting spam through
email. Another way is to actually create your online
resume, which we are going to do in this course, and post it as a part of your
website. But remember this is not enough.
You also need to be able to print that resume from the browser.
Often the user will just hit the Print button inside the browser that they are currently
using. You want to know that if they do that that
the resume will hold up with its integrity, and look okay and fit on an 8 .5x11
inch piece of paper, and that you don't lose images, and that you don't have
too many colors, and that it looks good and professional.
And then it's always important to have the paper documen. That hasn't gone away either.
Usually somewhere in the process, someone will say, "I need the paper document."
There's a number of ways also to create this. The most common way is to use Microsoft Word
and create a doc, but you can also create a PDF of your Microsoft Word.
This allows you to do the historical method, which is to have a printed document
and to choose the kind of paper you want to print it on, or you can actually
create links on your website to these documents into these PDF files.
And a last but very important and growing way of connecting with prospective
employers is through networking. Using some of the online networking applications
is very important. One that I really like is indeed.com.
It's a little bit like Google for jobs. It's very simple to use and it's a great way
to find out what prospective employers are looking for and to get job descriptions
based on company, on size, on price, or salary, and on location.
Another very well known online application is monster.com.
Many, many people post their resumes up here, find jobs.
It's like Craigslist for jobs. And then finally there's a plethora of
peer-to-peer applications for networking. Things like LinkedIn or Plaxo. Some people
even their Facebook page as a way of connecting with each other, but the important
thing to remember is that if you want to have presence these days and you want
to get your name out there and have the prospective employers see you,
you've got to take a multipronged approach and you've got to figure out a way
to deliver your resume in a number of different ways.
It's highly recommended that you be facile, agile, and adaptable, and not lock
yourself into just the print idea of creating your resume.