Re: [tlug] [OT] Good IT Resume

["Sam Morrison" <sam@example.com>]

Just wanted to point something out for those of you who might not be aware. This only applies to those of you who are working through the headhunters. Most of these companies use a resume parser to index their applicants. My last employer was a recruiter in Honolulu. We even used a tool that could reverse match job descriptions to rank indexed resumes. So moral of the story: keywords are important. You want your resume to show up in the applicant searches. And for what is is worth, most of the account managers really do not understand the IT applicants they are working with.

> I put an extra amount of technical stuff in the projects description.
> I did mainly system admin projects. Now I'm thinking about that maybe
> a lot of tech info can confuse the HR that have to understand what do
> I know.

Pietro, this is spot on. These guys see a million people a day and they have way more applicants than positions. Make their lives easy. Also, make sure your resume layout / format is simple. You don't want any complications when it comes to parsing / indexing your information. I have seen people embed their resume as a graphic in a PDF. Though technically possible to extract the text through some OCR process, most resume parsers (at least the two that I am familiar with) will just error out and move on. Text in a PDF is fine, .doc is fine. Just keep it simple. Same goes with the format of the dates and information. Don't get fancy. 

Thanks for the layout Pietro. I haven't begun searching for work out here, but when I do I will re-organize as you suggested. Also, note that this resume parsing is something we did in the US. But I know for a fact that Manpower parses, and would be pretty confident that most of these others do too. At least the big companies. There is a format known as HR-XML that a lot of the internet job boards format their posted resumes into. These can be easily transfered to employers and indexed.

http://www.hr-xml.org

http://ns.hr-xml.org/2_5/HR-XML-2_5/SIDES/JP/SIDESJPLocalizations.html

Just in case you are interested, these are the parsers I have worked with. After using we Resume Mirror for a while we switched to Sovren:

Resume Mirror
http://www.talenttech.com/products/components/rm_extraction.htm

Sovren
http://www.sovren.com/

Thanks,
sam