Bite of Advice: Your resume calls for the right lighting ...
The Suggestion Kitty is back! And says … Don’t forget that your resume is the ultimate self-marketing tool. You want to convey honesty, but you also want to present yourself in the best possible light.
Think of this analogy …
When Barbara Walters interviews a celebrity for The View or one of her many Barbara Walters Specials, a soft-filter is applied to the video. The end result is still the real subject telling the same story, but the picture you see is easier on the eyes … it’s softer and more appealing. Gone are the blemishes, blood-shot eyes, and out-of-place hairs. The image invites you to keep watching and listening ... even if the celebrity herself is less than engaging!
Apply the same logic to your resume. Never lie … but utilize the art of clean formatting, well-crafted phrases, and appropriately placed modifiers to accentuate the right features and invite others to keep reading!
Meow!
gretchen
7 Comments
Pradeep said:
But .... despite clean formatting in Word and PDF - 12 out of my 14 interviews in 2 days at MS were holding a really torrid text-version of my resume!
This despite thefact that I had formatted a decent looking text version just for that purpose and attached that along with my word and PDf version.
apparently they were holding a machine -generated TXT version of the Word doc.
That the norm Gretchen? Or another of my "it happens only to ME" examples?
JobsBlog said:
Hi Pradeep - It sounds like you haven't read all my other posts on resume tips!! :) Yes, you should NEVER submit a Word or PDF version of your resume to a generic email alias (resume@microsoft.com, jobs@amazon.com, etc). Our systems take away all the formatting. You should submit only text version through these means.
But I always say you should have two versions of your resume. One text version (which can still be well-formatted and employ powerful, creative language) and one "pretty" version - which contains the same content but is formatted as you like using word or adobe. But I would suggest only submitting your pretty resume to real people once you've already secured an interview.
BR said:
Hi Gretchen,
I've been an off and on follower of your blogs since many months now. Thanks for this wonderful work.
Can you point me to right formatting resources? I tried the search box on this page (for formatting tips), and got a result pointing to Zoe's old post (<a rel="nofollow" target="_new" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/category/4172.aspx">http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/category/4172.aspx</a>) but the server returned 'Unknown Error'.
Thanks.
BR
BR said:
Ahh...never mind. I found many pointers in your resume tips section. Sorry for jumping the gun.
Regards,
BR
Brandon Paddock said:
Well seeing as this is going to be an issue for me very soon....
Is RTF supported? =D
JobsBlog said:
Brandon - It will still convert it to plain text. So I imagine most conversion from RTF to plain text goes ok - but you'd just want to test it make sure.
Brandon Paddock said:
Well, I sent mine to someone's direct e-mail address, so no idea if it got mangled by a filter. But I sent it in Word and TXT formats just to be safe :)