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Intelligent Resume Tools?
imrdkl asks: "It's time for me (and presumably a few others) to
start thinking about a career change. With 10 years of experience,
I'd like to be able to customize my resume a bit, to highlight the
experience/education which is pertinent to a given job, instead of
trying to say too much and boring the reader. Are there any tools out
there (non-web-based preferred) which help a person to create a
custom resume based (perhaps) on a small database which contains
relevant work-experience highlights?"
I would certainly hope you don't need to rely on a tool to write your resume for you. If you have the experience that you claim, you should have no problem selling yourself on an 8.5 x 11 piece of white paper. Writing a resume isn't that hard... just think of what you know and write it down, then organize it into a well grouped format and print it out.
If you need ideas, this site will give you plenty of ideas and suggestions on how to build a great resume yourself.
Check XML resume at http://xmlresume.sf.net
If you work in IT, your addiction to XML
and cutting-edge technologies will be
surely appreciated.
Automated enough ?
#!/usr/bin/perl
die "Syntax: $0 [your name]\n" unless ($ARGV[0]);
@job=('webdesigner', 'IT director', 'ASP programmer', 'VB programmer', 'FORTRAN programmer', 'CEO', 'spam hunter', 'CTO', 'BOFH','sp
ammer');
@company=('Microsoft','IBM','Compaq',"my mom's office",'my garage','a classified government agency','X-Files', 'NASA');
print "I, @ARGV, have ".int (rand(15))." years of experience as ".$job[rand(10)]." at ".$company[rand(8)]."\n";
@degree=('MBA','junior high','PhD');
@school=('Harvard','Oxford','Princeton','Bopal University');
print "I have a ".$degree[rand(3)]." at ".$school[rand(4)]." so I am more than qualified for this position.\n";
print "\n\nI must also add that I'm gay, afro-american and have some sort of physical deficiency, and my lawyer is ready to sue your
company for discrimination if I don't get this job. \n\n Thanks and have a nice day.\nSincerely yours, @ARGV\n"
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
...but not what the original poster had in mind. I have to agree with most of the replies. If you've got that kind of experience, writing a resume should be simple.
HOWEVER. What I want to see is something that will store this information, possibly in a db or somesuch, and then spit it out easily into multiple formats. The problem I'm finding now is, I've been asked for PDF, PostScript, HTML, Plaintext, RichText, and MS Word versions of my resume. So I've got 6 versions to keep up to date. Granted, it's not all THAT hard, but it's still a pain in the ass.
The ideal situation would be to stuff all the relevent information (name, contact info, objective, experience, skills) into a database, then have an automagic confragulator or whatever generate the various formats. That way, I only have to update the information one, and this automagical process can just be a link on my homepage to "Download my resume in your favorite format". Adding a format is as simple as adding an output filter for the automagic confragulator. So when someone asks for ClarisWorks for MacOS 1.0 format, you hack together the appropriate output filter, and now you can kick it out in 7 formats, instantaneously, and always up to date.
If anyone knows of something like that, it would be -very- useful.
-j
"To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root