Intelligent Resume Tools?

imrdkl asks: "It's time for me (and presumably a few others) to start thinking about a career change. With 10 years of experience, I'd like to be able to customize my resume a bit, to highlight the experience/education which is pertinent to a given job, instead of trying to say too much and boring the reader. Are there any tools out there (non-web-based preferred) which help a person to create a custom resume based (perhaps) on a small database which contains relevant work-experience highlights?"

Tools?

[Calle Ballz]

I would certainly hope you don't need to rely on a tool to write your resume for you. If you have the experience that you claim, you should have no problem selling yourself on an 8.5 x 11 piece of white paper. Writing a resume isn't that hard... just think of what you know and write it down, then organize it into a well grouped format and print it out.

If you need ideas, this site [jobweb.com] will give you plenty of ideas and suggestions on how to build a great resume yourself.

One nice one..

[Merkins]

OK, it's web based, and Australian..

But, SEEK [seek.com.au] has an online resume builder that is not too bad. It might give you some ideas anyway.

LaTeX

[Fastjack]

Odds are you wouldn't be asking if you knew LaTeX, but you can do some basic-to-intermediate categorization and conditional inclusion of entries with it.

If you use a macro for everything you also get the advantage of being able to easily reformat everything if you decide one format is better than another, or even if you want to format different categories of items differently.

On the down-side, you'd have to know LateX ...

Re:Actually, there is a use for this...

[oni]

The problem I'm finding now is, I've been asked for PDF, PostScript, HTML, Plaintext, RichText, and MS Word versions of my resume. So I've got 6 versions to keep up to date.

It's definitely a pain in the ass. I keep the master copy of my resume in HTML, print it to postscript and convert to PDF with ps2pdf. That part is easy. The problem is keeping a word version up to date. If I open the HTML in Word it looks terrible - and somehow expands to over three pages!

Don't narrow your resume down too much...

[Rude Turnip]

IMO, you're better off having one standard resume that doesn't contain any bs. Potential employers might like to know that you're well-rounded and flexible in your skills, rather than a drone that specializes in a narrow range of skills. Be honest about yourself and your background, just don't drag it out.

Customization should be left to your cover letter, where you introduce yourself and put to words how your skills and experience would contribute to a company.

The lesson here: Optimize your resume to paint a concise picture of yourself; optimize your cover letter to show specific employers how you would fit in.

Online resume

[djweis]

There is a nice one at http://www.seekingsuccess.com [seekingsuccess.com].

Forget the "tools"

[red_dragon]

Many have stated here already: don't rely on those so-called "résumé writers". I wholeheartedly agree with this, since there is no one way of writing a résumé that works for everyone. However, there are some things to know about résumés that do apply to all.

One of the things that I remember from my tech writing class is the way most people tend to read a résumé. Imagine that you draw two diagonal lines on your average letter- or A4-sized piece of paper from each corner to the opposite corner, thus dividing the page into four triangles. Of these, the topmost triangle is always the one to be read first; if the HR droid has not found anything interesting from a quick scan of this small area, chances are your résumé will be chucked into the bin. Of course, this doesn't mean that you must cram your entire résumé into that top 1/4 of the page, but it is best if you try to place the most relevant information within that space.

Following that, I've found that the following order of items is preferred by HR people:

• Name, address, contact info;
• Objective;
• Skills, in descending order of relevance to the intended job position;
• Previous work/experience, in reverse chronological order;
• Educational background;
• References (optional).

HTH.