S P O N S O R S

(February 28, 1997): Remember when you learned to drive? The seat felt funny, all of the pedals seemed to do the wrong things. Once the car got moving, there was a terribly disorienting out of control feeling that came from the rush of new sensations. After a while, those strange feelings (and the associated terror) receded into memory. Learning any new technology is like that. The rhythms are different but the basic experience is the same. What is initially foreign and bewildering becomes normal as you get used to the technology. Using the web is like driving a car...you don't have to be a great mechanic to be an effective driver. You don't even need to know anything about what's under the hood (though it can be helpful).

Combining a job hunt with learning the web seems to aggravate the experience. You might find it comforting to know that everyone involved in learning about the web and making it happen is on a steep "learning curve". Just about the time something seems clear, it changes. Once you get used to working in an environment like this, you've got a skill that will help you in a variety of settings.

Using the web is precisely about continual learning. This is an attribute that will serve you well in the job market. Even if you never find a job "on the web", having the experience under your belt is well worth the investment.

(February 27, 1997): With 3500 job hunting sites (at last count), staying focused on your job hunt can be a frustrating exercise. There is no shortage of opportunity for distraction. We suggest that you take a single starting point and make it the default page in your browser. It's a fairly simple thing to do. Copy the location of the page that you want to use as your starting point into your browser's default page setting. (It's usually located in the Preferences section.)

Given the rate a which the web evolves, we can guarantee that any site that you pick will be less that optimal. You're going to miss some things. But, by focusing on a distinct subset, you'll be able to transform your efforts from a search of what's new to a productive job hunt. It requires some discipline.

(February 26, 1997): If you're a technical contract professional, you'll want to add Volt to your bookmark list. The no-nonsense job listings will tell you immediately whether or not there's an opportunity in Volt's network of offices.

(February 25, 1997): Poke around the web for Resume advice. You'll find lots of it. Like most advice, what you find is more likely to reflect the biases of the advice giver than your particular needs.

The most forward thinking advice attempts to describe the process of dealing with the fact that your resume will be reviewed by search engines. This happens on the web and inside of companies. The problem with designing your package for search engines is that the technology is moving very rapidly as the result of the explosion in Web content. It has become the case that designing your resume for search engines has become meaningless as a strategy (in spite of earlier advice you can find in our archives).

Today, there is very little standardization in the way that resumes are processed.

Small companies do it manually. For these targets, a professional presentation is very important. Medium to large sized companies usually use a resume database and "scannability" is critical (see the tips from Resumix, a resume database company). For these targets, the quality of your presentation must be tailored to meet the requirements of the scanner. For companies that use the web as a recruiting tool, neither of the above approaches work. You have to use an electronic (email or html) resume.

For a short time, embedding keywords in your resume (so that search engines could find them) was a smart approach to making sure that your resume surfaced in the candidate pool. Technology has moved ahead and that once intelligent approach now makes your credentials package look silly. Anymore, the best search engines will rate your resume on the number of times a relevant word occurs in the text (They will ignore the same word repeated a number of times in a row.)

So, how to approach building a resume? We think that your resume is a statement of

• what you want,
• what you have,
• the distance between the two, and
• how you intend to close the gap.
Obviously, not all of this will fit on one page (and we do suggest that you keep it to a page). So, the final component of resume development is your ability to compress the results succintly.

Very interestingly, meeting the requirements of both small and large companies (see above) is the best justification we know of for making your resume a searchable web page.

As you move in and out of the job market over the next 10 years, it will be important to remember that the technology for evaluating resumes is changing. Each time you go to prepare for a job search (in the forseeable future), you'll need to revisit the current requirements for resumes.

(February 24, 1997): If you're going to use email to submit your resume, you might as well get serious about bulk mailing. As an experiment, you might want to try the dreadful service offered by the Atlantic Alliance called Resumail^TM. If you can tolerate wading through their mind-numbing interface, the service allows you to simultaneously submit your resume to over 240 San Francisco Bay Area Recruiting companies.

Initially, we worried about the pros and cons of bulk resume submittal. The more we thought and looked, the more it became obvious that sending large volumes of your resume out by email is a survival tactic, not a moral issue. Stay tuned to this channel and we'll keep you posted on the best and newest versions of these services.

These are the early days of Internet based job hunting. Given the inherent difficulties in using Resumail^TM, we doubt that it is long for the world. But, like Medusa, when one of these services dies off, two will spring up to take their place. While it's open, take advantage of the opportunity to get your resume distributed to another block of places. Bombs away!

For a much more elegant implementation of the same idea, be sure to visit our long time favorite Resume Drop

More Resources

• Companies with Job Ads (Nearly 1500 Links to Companies and their Job Postings)
• Tools (Everything You need for a Job Hunt)
• The daily newsletters are archived in weekly volumes in the Archives. Past issues include:

Many of the items are also included in the Tools Area. The Web's largest collection of Employment related resources is also included in the Tools Area. -----------------