Resume, Letter, Interview
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Web Resume Design Guidelines
Whatever you can do on paper, you can do on the Web with more
ease and creativity. Web résumés can demonstrate your
accomplishments and level of expertise with a personal style that is
lost with traditional paper résumés because you can communicate as
much information about yourself as you need to achieve your career
goals.
Simply stated, a Web résumé is a document containing clickable
text and images created in HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup
Language, and is the set of codes called markup tags that control
how documents look and behave on the Web. When these codes are
inserted into a text document, they instruct Web browsers both how
to display the document, and what to do when links are selected (or
clicked). The term World Wide Web refers to that portion of the
Internet that is available in HTML.
However, Web résumés employ a unique set of design strategies in
addition to traditional résumé development. The purpose of the Web
Résumé Design Guidelines is to provide pointers on some of those
basic design strategies
(not writing strategies) for holding a viewer's attention in
presenting information about yourself.
This Web Résumé Design
Guidelines is not to be duplicated in any form without the exclusive
permission of the author (see disclaimer below).
Designing your first Web Résumé
Web résumés can be as large as you want them to be, and visitors to
your Web résumé can choose to concentrate on what topic of
information interests them. Links, or hyperlinks are important
navigational aids that make it easy for your visitors to locate the
information they desire quickly.
- Establish hyperlinks at the beginning of your
résumé to important categories within your résumé.
These might include hyperlinks to your specialized training
and certifications.
- Use hyperlinks to support, not distract the
viewer. For example, adding a hyperlink to an
employer’s Web site such as General Motors, will have the
viewer wandering through the Web pages on that Web site,
where they will likely lose interest in returning back to
your résumé.
- Use hyperlinks to aid in navigation. If
your Web résumé scrolls down several screens, provide
hyperlinks that let the viewer jump back to the top of the
page, or jump back to a major section of your résumé.
Because you can easily update your Web résumé, you can easily
keep it up to date.
- Keep your résumé current. The unique
nature of the Internet is that information is updated daily.
Outdated information is quickly passed over for more current
information.
- Provide an obvious way to contact you.
Many recruiters still like to see an address and phone
number, in addition to a hyperlink to your email address.
Many people find reading from a computer screen harder than
reading from a printed page. If recruiters have to scroll across
pages and link among multiple pages to find the information they are
looking for, this can have the undesired effect of discouraging them
from further studying your résumé.
- Keep your Web résumé to a single Web page.
If a recruiter finds your résumé interesting, it’s going to
get printed anyway. Multiple pages make printing a
time-consuming process, since the recruiter would have to
open each page and print them separately.
- Provide a keyword summary. This gives
viewers the opportunity to assess your skills and
qualifications at a glance. There are two rules of thumb you
can apply to keyword selection and presentation: 1) Limit
the number of keywords to 25-35; and 2) Prioritize their
order the same way you would prioritize the information
presented in your résumé. Keyword summaries are also
valuable indexing tools for search engines that either index
using those words in your HTML <META> tags, or that index
the first few sentences on your Web page itself.
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