Natasha Price
How do you optimize your resume?
As I apply to jobs and rewrite my resume until the heat death of the universe, I have started getting resume feedback from as many different sources as possible. One magical thing in this process is learning their processes for working on their resumes. Some people create these Google documents or spread sheets, and iterate upon each bullet, sometimes saving each version. For me that process feels messy and I get lost in information. Sometimes they take apart the job description and work backwards and rewrite the whole resume. Some people run their resume through an analyzer for keywords. Some people also check their ATS compatibility. I've even heard of hiding white text that is not viewable but will be picked up by word-scraping bots.
I started fantasizing about my perfect resume builder. One that guided me to a clean, ATS friendly, auto formatted resume. I'm a visual designer so part of me prides myself in making my resume in Illustrator, but I also am not trying to be a professional resume designer, I'm trying to make products that make life easier. I want to color code my bullets, see previous versions, break it open into a sub menu that lets me order them and highlight key words that I can then run a job description through as a filter to determine the best matching bullets. I want to make everything a module, visualize it easier, and make creating a resume suited to each job as easy as possible.
I need to start with researching all the top resume builders, both online and mobile. I need to formally interview people, starting with strong resume builders, I can find more of these specific people with a strong survey. I personally also like to start visualizing right away, sometimes being unconnected from your research leads to novel features. I'm someone who likes to do it all at once; I design very basic wireframes and user journeys along with creating a set of documents such as a competitive analysis and user stories spreadsheet and just building them all up and iterate all at once.
Image by Coffee Beanfrom Pixabay