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Written by: Tracy P. Miller
Editor, Publisher
TearTaylor's Career Corner
In the past there was only one type of resume job applicants had to contend with and that was the traditional paper resume. It was usually typed in a Courier font with simple formatting, but nowadays, job applicants have to struggle with several other kinds: ASCII plain text and ASCII hypertext. I'll describe both, or rather all three formats that job applicants currently use to highlight their professional achievements and you can decide for yourself which one better fits your job-hunting needs.
Traditional Resumes
The conventional resume is usually mailed out in response to ads or brought along by job applicants to their interviews as a leave-behind for hiring personnel. This format allows candidates the freedom to display their special document creativity or budding graphic style. Applicants can choose from many different font styles to highlight their professional achievements (e.g. Arial, Calisto, Century Gothic, Tahoma, Verdana, etc.). They also have the freedom to decide how they want their documents laid out, if they want exaggerated page spacing, nifty bullets, neat table setups, colored text, colored borders, special shading, etc.
The big downside to this more traditional resume constructed using Microsoft’s Word or some other popular word processing software is that these same documents are usually embedded with rich formatting, unique fonts, special bullets, or distinctive spacing, which make them highly unscannable. They tend to lose much of their important features when being scanned. The text can become mingled, overlapped, and many times elements disappear entirely.
ASCII Plain Text Resumes
This document is exactly what its name describes. It's plain; it lacks any type of formatting whatsoever. Web-based job boards usually require this type of document in order to post a resume with them, and even though this type of file is boring as heck to look at, it's what the recruiting industry calls extremely scannable. The great thing about ASCII files is that they always stay in tact after scanning and ultimately again when converted to any company's massive resume database. The text never becomes blurred, or loses any of its sharp, distinctive detail.
To help ensure that your resume is scannable
or as my buddies would probably say in the recruiting industry, "that it comes out
clean on the other end," then you'll definitely want to make sure to follow
our list of
guidelines
for pulling together a scannable resume.
If you already have a beautifully typed resume
that was created using Word and don’t want to spend another hour or two
constructing a new one just for the sake of making it scannable, then you’ll
definitely want to review our
instructions
for converting an existing Word resume to an ASCII or text only file.
ASCII Hypertext
Resumes
This is also an ASCII file format, but instead
it is identified by the .htm or .html file extension as opposed to the .txt
file extension for ASCII Plain Text files. You can create your own
electronic or rather web-based resume using one of the newer web authoring
tools presently out on the market such as HotMetal Pro, Adobe SiteMill,
Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Microsoft FrontPage. Once you’re finished
creating your resume using your nifty web-authoring tool, you can contact
one of the many web-hosting companies to see about getting your resume site
hosted for free. There’s many companies out there offering free
hosting or cheap hosting rates (e.g. Angelfire, Innerhost, Myhosting,
Tripod, ValueWeb, etc.). In no time, you’ll have an extremely
creative, one-of-a-kind resume out on the Net for companies to look at.
But before you get all excited about the
possibilities of having your resume on display for Internet viewers to ogle
over, let's briefly mention the downside to this form. If you do
decide to pursue this creatively different route, you'll have to contend
with the big responsibility of generating traffic to your own site, which is
traffic in the form of prospective employers. Keep in mind, again,
that if you stored your resume with one of the many web-based job assistance
companies (monster.com, yahoo's hotjobs.com or hcareers.com) that already
have elaborate resume databases, then you wouldn’t have to contend with this
troubling aspect. They’d do all the work for you. They already
have thousands of employers that regularly review their databases looking to
fill positions. Each time an interested employer accesses one of their
databases he or she types in a couple of key words or descriptive terms
pinning the requirements for each position and presto! The computer
returns an instant list of potential candidates for the position they’re
trying to fill. But whichever route you ultimately decide on, please keep in
mind that it is still always a good idea to have the traditional resume
tucked away for safe keeping. Remember, once you land the interview
it's always expected by any veteran hiring director that you'll leave a
conventional resume behind for him or her to add to your file or at least for
them to review
closer.
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This article
is © 2003-2005 by Tracy
Miller and may not be reposted without written permission from the author
and may not be reprinted for profit.