e-Resume Tutorials

Create a Social Media Ready™ Version of Your Resume

If you are creating your own document to be used on professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, the document format needs to be modified. When properly optimized, proprietary scanning technology will accurately "read" the data in your resume.

Our Social Media Ready™ format, which is included in our Comprehensive Resume Service, is an electronic document that has been appropriately formatted for use in creating a social media resume as well as building a personal brand and online professional networking profile.

Keep in mind that your visibility in online searches will be enhanced by the effectiveness of keywords within your resume; therefore, be sure to begin with a keyword resume.

Follow these steps to make sure your resume is optimized for social media environments:

Remove all graphics because they can confuse some technologies/systems. This includes art, shading, bullets, and (to be safe) horizontal and vertical lines. Asterisks, tildes, and hyphens can be used since these are universal symbols.
Be sure your name is on the first line of the resume and no other text is on that line.
Because many systems utilize a proprietary format or technology, it is best to remove other extraneous formatting, e.g., tabs and tables, as these may become distorted in the transition.
Use common and easily recognizable fonts. Ideally use a universally recognized sans-serif font (without the little "feet" on characters) such as Arial or Helvetica.
Keep all point sizes consistent and between 10 and 14 points.
Use standard line spacing, i.e., don’t compress or expand lines of text.
Remove bold, italic, script, and underlining. Use all caps sparingly to create visual emphasis.
Keep "To" and "From" dates on one line, include months, and use a single date on college degrees.
Use hyphens (rather than parentheses) around telephone area codes: 555-456-3945.
Be sure to check for specific terms used by the site and adjust headings in your resume so that the technology is sure to appropriately sort the data, and then carefully test and review the output for accuracy prior to using it in your job search.

Once you have prepared a Social Media Ready™ version of your resume, you may use it on many job search and social networking sites. Also, it may be adapted to a Keyword Scannable Resume, which is a paper resume that is likely to be scanned into an applicant tracking system.

To review an example, see Social Media Ready™ Resume.