Computer Info

By Steve Alexander
January 24, 2000 12:00 PM ET 


Online job hunting is changing for information technology professionals, and the traditional resume may fall victim to that change. Recruiters who work for career-related Web sites say the trend is to have applicants fill out profiles, which are more useful than resumes. 
"The profile is really where the industry is headed," says John Elliott, director of customer fulfillment systems at Alternative Resources Corp., a Barrington, Ill.-based company that places IT contractors. 
"The profile results in a resumelike data source that is much more detailed in specific skills and competencies and gives the recruiter a consistent format that matches tightly with the requirements of customer companies," he says. 
That's not to say that the e-mail resume is dead. Profiles are just catching on, and most online IT job-seekers still post resumes on Web sites or e-mail them to recruiters. But recruiters say the new cousin of the traditional e-mail resume, the HTML resume, which comes complete with links and graphics, is a step in the wrong direction for IT job applicants. 
Recruiters say they don't like resumes created with the Internet programming language HTML because the format takes too long to read. Also, the use of links requires that a recruiter go to the trouble of visiting a Web site to see information that should have been included in the resume. 
"When you are a recruiter, your life is filled with resumes," says Michael Forrest, president of Indianapolis-based JobOptions LLC, which runs the resume-posting site www.joboptions.com. "A lot of it becomes homework, and recruiters sit at home, having a beer while paging through resumes, trying to screen people out," Forrest says. 
"What they want to be able to do is jump quickly to the applicant's most recent position, then jump over to the educational information," he adds. "The more variance there is from a standard resume, the more difficult it is to compare apples to apples." 
Others agree. "The HTML resume is often no better than a resume presented in Word or regular ASCII text. It doesn't benefit us as recruiters," says Pam Parker, a human resources consultant at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Career Central Corp., which operates the site www.careercentral.com. 
"The reality is that most recruiters aren't there yet for HTML," says Joel Wilkinson, chief career-development specialist at New York-based Career Experience Corp., which offers career advice to IT job applicants. Parker and Wilkinson say no more than 10% of the resumes they see are written in HTML. 
Technical Difficulties 
Recruiters say job applicants gain nothing by demonstrating their prowess with HTML, since it's not a hot IT skill. What's more, the time IT people spend creating HTML resumes may be wasted, because the recruiter generally can't use the information in that form. Most searchable resume databases are text-only, which means an HTML resume must be converted to text before being entered into a database. 
"We dump resumes into a resource database that uses raw text and doesn't accommodate HTML resumes," Elliott says. "So an HTML resume must be saved as a text file, which adds another step for the recruiter." 
To make matters worse, many client companies expect recruiters to transmit batches of resumes via e-mail. Since many of those clients don't have HTML-enabled e-mail, the HTML either is converted to text or, worse, isn't converted and becomes gibberish, making the HTML tags visible within the text. 
"Often, the client is seeing less of the HTML resume than we are," notes Parker. 
The answer for IT professionals is to concentrate on content, says Linda Natansohn, senior vice president of ventures at TMP Worldwide Inc.'s interactive division in Maynard, Mass., which operates the job-posting Web site Monster. com. 
"If you are a proficient technology professional, it is going to show in the profile you fill out or in the content of your resume," she says. "Whether or not your resume is in HTML isn't going to convince an HR person that you would be a better hire." 
Alexander is a freelance writer in Edina, Minn.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/40863/Demise_of_the_HTML_resume?taxonomyId=0&pageNumber=2