A cop recently mistook an acorn hitting his car for the sound of a gun firing at him from the handcuffed, searched, man inside the car. Officer then proceeded to do a double combat roll, scream “IM HIT”, and unload two magazines into the car with the handcuffed man inside.
You need a “Page of Expertise” attached to the end of this resume with every technology, tool, and piece of equipment you’ve ever touched. I’m dead serious. You’ve got the standard office apps listed as well as the GIMP (which is awesome, BTW 👍) but have you ever fooled around with Access? Used Outlook? Skype? They need to be in your resume!
Think of the “Page of Expertise” as an addendum that’s just a great big list of keywords that will ensure your resume isn’t filtered out by HR people that don’t know any better. When they get a job description from a hiring manager that says something like, “Marketing Assistant: Must have experience with Excel. Nice-to-have: Experience with Outlook and Skype.” The HR person will post a similar job description (they just love to mess with it!) and then when 10,000 resumes come in they’ll pass them all through a “keyword filter” and any resume that doesn’t have “outlook” and “skype” will never see the light of day!
Always remember this: The hiring manager and the people doing the interview are only going to look at the first page and the first job or two in your work history. They might glance at everything else but it’s unlikely. The universal advice about tailoring your resume for the job you’re applying for is 100% true but the truth is that that advice really only applies to that first page and only after you’ve made it through the HR keyword filters.
So add a second page that has titles like, “Office Tools” that has every stupid little tool that counts as “office software” from Excel to Outlook to Skype to Notepad++ to silly things like Winzip and Winrar. Stuff you’d think literally anyone could figure out in five minutes still goes on that page! Always assume that every job is going to get 10,000 applicants and HR is going to keep whittling them down until they find candidates that have all the keywords they can possibly think of.
Here’s another thing: If you get past HR and in that interview and they ask you, “What’s this Page of Expertise all about?” Be honest: “That’s so I can get past the keyword filters that HR uses. HR people often have to filter thousands of resumes and I don’t want to get skipped because I didn’t put the word, ‘winzip’ somewhere in my resume even though a monkey could figure it out.” They’ll think you’re a genius and hire you! 👍
Thank you so much! That’s a great advice indeed! Although oh boy I’ve used a lot of apps and tools but I never take the time to master them and I never knew how to put that on my CV. In the previous version of my CV I wrote “Interest in Learning New Tools”
Your level of skill with the tools is irrelevant from the perspective of the “Page of Expertise”. You’re not claiming to be a master of these things, “just have some expertise/experience” with them.
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