Social Resume: How Job Seekers and Employers are Connecting Online

via Online Colleges by Kristin Marino

There’s no way around it … you need a resume to get a job. And it’s not just enough to list your job experience onto a Word document, plop your education information at the end, and email it to recruiters. For one thing recruiters are looking in all sorts of interesting places for the next great employees for their companies. Also, potential employees are impressing recruiters with their social resumes.

Digital social resumes are a modern take on traditional resumes. While you definitely need to include your work experience and education on your social resume, you can expand the information you provide to prospective employers to include samples of work, pertinent links and more.

When you create your social resume, you are, in essence, creating an online presence as a person who makes a valuable contribution to the workplace and who is worth seeking out for positions recruiters are looking to fill. Even if you aren’t actively looking for a new job, it’s smart to create a presence on career networking sites such as LinkedIn.

Recruiters are known to scour these sites looking for workers who meet specific job criteria. And while Facebook has been known to have a hand in more than one person losing their job due to inappropriate postings or over-use at work, now you may be able to use Facebook to get a job - Facebook launched a job board in late 2012.

Nothing can take the place of that basic PDF resume, but that should be only one tool in your job-hunting arsenal. Learn more about social resumes in our infographic below, then check out our list of 10 tips for optimizing your social resume.

Since even a medium-sized copy of the infographic manages to convey very little please link through to see it.

And readers in the UK, which is most of you, remember that a CV does not equal an American resume (although it comes close and it the case of the tips is probably indistinguishable).

20 things to leave off your CV

This post in the icould blog was written by someone from Position Ignition: UK Career Consultants

The 20 things that should not be included:

1. ‘Curriculum Vitae’ or ‘CV’
2. The word ‘Résumé’
3. Photo
4. Video
5. Current work phone/email address
6. Date of birth or age
7. Nationality
8. Race or religion
9. Details of your marital status or children
10. Reason for leaving your last company
11. List of GCSEs/A Level subjects/degree modules
12. Waffle
13. Adjectives
14. The first person
15. The third person
16. Hobbies such as reading, walking or dining out
17. ‘References can be provided on request’
18. LinkedIn recommendations
19. Clipart/borders/illustrations
20. Tables

There is a short explanation of each of these here.

---

Tag clouds for analysing documents

via Karen Blakeman's Blog by Karen Blakeman on 29 June

CV not getting you those all important interviews?
Nobody answering your job advert?
Or perhaps your corporate publicity is not doing the biz?

Processing your document through a tag cloud generator might give you a clue as to where you are going wrong. Sue Hill gave a presentation at the recent City Information Group open day on CPD and skills. In passing she mentioned that they sometimes run a CV or job description through a tag cloud generator to show people why their lovingly-created prose is way off the mark. The tag cloud brings to the fore your most used terms and it can be a shock to discover that you have placed the emphasis in totally the wrong area. It then struck me that you could do this with any form of literature – a web page, training publicity, membership recruitment forms.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tag cloud generators on the Web and most of them are free. For starters try Wordle, Tagcrowd, or Tag Cloud Generator.

The example Karen provides is a tag cloud of the UKeiG home page generated by Wordle.

Hazel's comment:
OK, I know I said I'd do this as soon as I got in from church but ... but ... What the heck, I just didn't.
Stunning idea though and it really works.

Bio Logic

via Word Wise by Dan Santow on 16 February

While “who am I?” may be one of the greatest philosophical (and unanswerable) questions of our lives, we’re still often asked to write up our life stories for new business presentations in about 300 words or less.

More ...

This very useful advice on how to achieve something reasonable reminds me that the "about ADSET" page I've just done for the (partially) rebuilt website needs an "about Hazel" and "about Dawn" piece. 300 words seems about right to tell you who we are and what we do -- not forgetting that the marketing gurus say that I should also say how what we do can benefit you.

Hobbies indicate cultural fit of candidates

59% of employers claim that life outside work gives a clear indication of whether or not a person might fit well with a company's culture, but one third of candidates do not list hobbies on their CV.
Read more...
The People Bulletin from AP Information Services