You may have the snazziest business suit and all the skills in the world, but if your resume is not up to snuff, you are not going to get any job interviews. You must build your resume to ensure you have the strongest resume you can put forward, since it is the first impression you make on a potential employer. If you do not have a resume yet, make it a priority.
In addition to keeping your resume up to date, a nicely formatted layout for visual appeal can go a long way toward making your resume stand out from all the others. Here are three online resume building tools that can help you create a professional-looking resume.
Google Documents
Google Documents is a free document processing alternative to Microsoft Word. Like Word, Google Documents has templates that you can use to build your resume. To use Google Documents, you need a Google account.
Create a new document from a template, then search for "resume." Select one of the templates that you like and fill in the suggested areas with your information. Since your resume is a Google document, you have complete control over the details and can change any feature you don't like or need.
When you're done building your resume, you can publish it to the web or download it in a variety of formats for printing. Since Google Documents is cloud-hosted, your resume will be available to you anywhere you go, even on your smartphone if you have Google's Drive application installed.
As a working professional, you should create an account on LinkedIn and keep it up-to-date with your business achievements, projects and skill sets. As you build your profile, you can continuously expand your personal network to connect to other professionals. In addition to providing a resource you can add to your online presence, LinkedIn lets you export your completed profile into a professional-looking resume as a Word document or PDF.
With LinkedIn, you can save time by building your resume and your professional online presence at the same time.
Resume.com
Resume.com gives you the ability to literally build your resume online. Choose what sections you want on your resume, then follow the suggestions about what to write for each section. When you are done, publishing your resume on the site will generate a custom, professional-looking URL that you can give to potential employers. You can also download a Microsoft Word document or PDF version for printing purposes.
Plain Text
If you apply to jobs online, sometimes the application form will have a text area to copy and paste your resume in a plain-text format. Regardless of the method you choose to build your resume, having a nicely formatted plain-text version of your resume is a good idea.
Building your resume using online resume building tools is a great way to take advantage of tried-and-true methods that have worked for many job seekers. By reducing the chore of layout management, you can focus on tailoring the resume to your exact needs for each job.
(Photo courtesy of stockimages / freedigitalphotos.net)
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