Excuciatingly detailed resumes

Subject: Excuciatingly detailed resumes
From: geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 08:47:53 -0500

Dan Brinegar reported a horror story involving the
requirement to build a resume that listed every detail of
his entire life. No idea why someone would want that, but I
have an "I'll do it real soon now" project that might help.

My project is to take all my old resumes (which I still
keep file copies of) and combine them into a single massive
resume... and for each chunk of information, rewrite it
three ways: once as expository text at a fairly high level
of detail, once as a "one liner" bullet, and once as a
"what would I see if I were an OCR program looking for
keywords?" line. The goal is to be able to produce a single
wordprocessor file that lets me cut and paste all the
relevant parts (or simply delete the irrelevant parts) to
create custom resumes for any application... for example,
the expository text makes a nice skeleton for a cover
letter, the bullets work for a one-page resume, and the
keywords work for an ASCII resume or something I know will
be OCRed. The entire file works if someone needs my life
story for whatever reason.

The approach needs some tweaking, and the custom resume
that you build from the encyclopedic file needs a good edit
before you send it anywhere, but it's easy to maintain the
file after each new job. I haven't been sufficiently
interested in seeking a new job to convince myself it's
worth the effort, but it may work very well for you.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)} geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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