How To-138: "How to Post Your Resume Online"

How to Post Your Resume Online

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

When you are out of work or looking for a better job, posting your resume online can help you cover your bases. Of the various sources you may find your next job, it is becoming increasingly more likely that you'll find a job through some career site. Resume posting can give you a jump start to your new job by increasing your chances of being seen by potential employers and recruiters.

Steps

1. If you don't have a resume yet, create one as outlined in other WikiHows listed below.
   
2. Update your resume so that it is better formatted to be posted online.
   
• Convert your resume to a text-only document (see the tips below).
  
• Update the words and phrases in your resume so that an employer or recruiter doing an online search will find your resume.
  
• For example: If you are a computer programmer and your job title was 'Programmer/Analyst II', but what you want a job for is really related to HTML webpage programming, you should make sure that you mention HTML, webpages, programming and other related words and phrases all over in your resume. Don't over-do it- your resume should still read nicely, but make sure that you include the keywords and phrases that you'll want to be found under.
  
• Keep a Word formatted copy of your resume as many job boards also allow you to upload the .doc version. Plus, interested hiring managers will generally ask for a better formatted resume than what the job board offers them.
  
3. If your resume is long, you may want to consider preparing multiple specialized resumes for each type of job you would consider. This allows you to customize your resume to somewhat match your potential employer, without you even knowing who that employer is.
   
4. Create a cover letter that makes more sense to an employer who finds you online. You can't be specific and talk directly to your new boss by name on a job board, so you should change your cover letter to reflect that. Your cover letter should also be converted to a text-only document (see the tips below).
   
5. Target the big job boards first:
   
• Monster
  
• Career Builder
  
• Yahoo/HotJobs
  
6. However, don't completely ignore the smaller boards:
   
• There are many job boards that are specific to an industry. If you find job boards for your industry, it might be best to post to all of them to increase your odds.
  
• Many of the smaller general boards are also a good shot. Many employers don't want to pay a lot of money to the big job boards, so they use a smaller board to search for a new employee.
  
• The more job boards you are on, the higher your chances of being found by your future employer.
  
7. Many career boards have what they call a Resume Builder and/or a Paste your Resume section. To fill out a job board's resume builder section, you'll need to gather your job history, your education information and skills from out of your resume and type them in separately.
   
• For each job, list:
  
• The name of the company you worked for.
  
• Your start and end date.
  
• What your job responsibilities were.
  
• Your major accomplishments at that job.
  
8. Take advantage of the free tools that a lot of the job boards offer when you post your resume on their site.
   
• A lot of the sites have what they call Job Agents or something similar; which are automatic search engines that look for jobs that match what you want. Many career site's job agents can be setup to email you a list of matching jobs as often as you like. It is worth taking the time to make sure that you have several job agents setup to send you not too many and not too few job leads. Try to setup a few different agents that target jobs that are slightly more broad than exactly what you are looking for. This allows you to filter out the job notifications you don't want, but makes sure you get all the ones you don't want to pass up.

Tips

• The majority of the job boards ask you to paste a text-only resume. When a job board asks you to paste your resume, don't paste from an HTML or Microsoft Word formatted resume. Save your resume as a .txt file, open it in Notepad and format the spacing as follows:
  
• Don't try to center or right-align text. This formatting will be lost and won't look the way you'd like it to. Left-align all text.
  
• Since you won't be able to use bold, underline, or italics, you can still make things look nice by CAPITALIZING section headings and using blank lines between sections.
  
• Put one or two blank lines between each job in your job history, then put just one carriage-return after each line of data.
  
• Consider using a professional resume writer who has experience with online resumes. It can be a science to put the right skills and phrases into a resume for you to come out on top of an employers search. If you do hire a resume writer, make sure and ask up front whether they have online posting experience and compare a few different writers.
  
• Consider using a resume posting service or a resume distribution service to save time and get the widest exposure quickly. Although most of distribution services cost from $50 - $100 dollars or more, how much money are you losing by not having your job more quickly? Using an outside service also allows you to focus your time on less tedious methods of job searching.
  
• Pay attention to what you get for your money. Some sites send your resume out by email to employers and recruiters, some sites fax your resume to employers, and others actually post your resume online as if you had done it yourself. You may want to use one or more of these types of services.
  
• If you compare different services to each other, make sure you understand which type of service each is providing so you can do an apples to apples comparison.
  
• Most resume posting sites tell you how many sites you will be posted to. Don't just base your decision on the number of sites. This can be tricky because sometimes if you post your resume to one site, it is actually putting you out on various sister-sites at the same time. A big example of this is newspaper sites. Some of the companies list each newspaper or regional site and count it as one of the sites they post to. This artificially inflates their numbers above their competition.
  
• It wouldn't hurt to look up the company at the BBB.

Warnings

• Make a decision about putting a street address on your resume. Some human resources managers require or strongly suggest putting one's home address on a resume, while others do not. Those who prefer or require it may see a home address as a sign of stability and may even discard resumes that lack home addresses on the basis that such an applicant is making it "seem like there is something to hide" from the company. However, when making this decision, weigh the privacy implications associated with this choice.
  
• Watch out for spam! Similar to your home address decision, the choice to use a particular email address on your resume is an important one. On almost every job site, when you register to post your resume online, you will need to provide an email address. Posting your email on job boards is a sure fire way to get both job prospects and a certain amount of spam. Consider getting a separate temporary email address which you can use for just your job search, then discard it when you are done. Some of the resume posting services can provide you with an email address on their servers and even filter out the spam for you.

Things You'll Need

• Your resume
  
• Your cover letter
  
• Access to a computer with Internet access
  
• An email address (preferably a separate one you don't use for anything else)
  
• Time (5-30 minutes for each site you post your resume to)
  
• However, if you use a resume posting service, you just post your resume with them, and they post it on many job boards at once, in this case you will probably need $50 to $100.
  
• You will also need a computer.

Related wikiHows

• How to Write a Resume
  
• How to Write a Cover Letter
  
• How to Find a Job Using Search Sites
  
• How to Include References on a Resume
  
• How to Write a Theater Resume
  
• How to Be a Reporter

Sources and Citations

• List of Online Job Banks
  
• Google's Directory of Resume Posting/Distribution Services
  
• Information on top job sites

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Post Your Resume Online. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.