Assignment

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After studying this chapter, you will be able to

1 List eight key steps to finding the ideal opportunity in today’s job market.

2 Explain the process of planning your résumé, including how to choose the best résumé organization.

3 Describe the tasks involved in writing your résumé, and list the major sections of a traditional résumé.

4 Characterize the completing step for résumés, including the six most common formats in which you can produce a résumé.

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COMMUNICATION CLOSE-UP AT Burning Glass

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Finding a job opening that matches your interests and qualifications—and then convincing employers you are the best person for the job—can be one of the most complicated, aggravating, and downright mystifying tasks you ever undertake.

If you eventually move into management or take the entrepreneurial plunge and build your own company, you’ll encounter this matchmaking challenge from the other side of the table. When a single job opening can attract dozens or hundreds of applicants, how can you sort through all the possibilities to identify the most promising candidates who warrant the time and expense of interviewing?

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Burning Glass applies artificial intelligence to the challenges of matching employer needs with employee skill sets.

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The challenge of matching the right people with the right jobs isn’t limited to employees and employers, either. It’s a vital issue for governments and educational institutions as well. Government bodies from the local up to the national level need to make workforce policy and investment decisions that reflect the real-world problems employees and employers encounter. And in the career-related facets of their broader educational missions, high schools, colleges, and universities need to understand what employers are looking for in order to provide the training and education that best prepare students for the job market.

In other words, matching people and job opportunities is one of society’s most important challenges, and doing it well or poorly has a tremendous impact on everyone’s financial well-being.

To a large degree, at every level this challenge is all about getting one’s hands on the right data and using them to make smart decisions. With more than 150 million employees in the Unites States alone, though, the total collection of this workforce data is massive.

To extract usable insights from this ocean of data, the Boston-based firm Burning Glass applies the power of artificial intelligence in a specialty known as job market analytics. In particular, it studies millions of job postings and career transitions to figure out what employers are looking for, what employees have to offer, and where gaps exist between the two sides. (Incidentally, when it studied the most important “baseline skills” across all professions, the company identified overall communication abilities as the most important skill and writing as the third-most important skill.)

Burning Glass integrates these job market insights into a variety of software tools that are used by employers, job seekers, colleges, and other parties involved in meeting the job-match challenge. In the human resources area, this software works in conjunction with applicant tracking systems, which you are sure to encounter at some point in your job search. Before a human being reads your résumé, it will likely be “read” by such a system, designed to help company recruiters find the most promising candidates and manage communication and data collection all the way through the recruiting, hiring, and orientation stages.

It’s difficult to fault the basic concept of an applicant tracking system. Software helps business professionals make all kinds of decisions, and most medium-sized and large companies get swamped with so many résumés that they have to rely on software to help recruiters manage the flow. However, the technology has developed a negative reputation in some quarters. Applicants express frustration that they can’t get past a “robot” and explain their qualifications to an actual human being. Employers get frustrated when people clog their systems by applying for jobs for which they are clearly not qualified or when applicants try to game the system by loading up their résumés with stacks of keywords they think the system is looking for. And employers sometimes complain they can’t find enough good applicants, even as good applicants are banging on the door but can’t get in. Overly aggressive filtering can be a problem

with poorly configured systems or for employers who dial up the qualification requirements to the point that only a superhero could make it over the barrier.

Companies such as Burning Glass aim to make this process work better for everybody by moving beyond simple keyword searches and résumé cataloging. For example, Burning Glass’s technology analyzes how keywords are used in a résumé in order to separate candidates who describe themselves legitimately and naturally from those who are simply stuffing their résumés with keywords. The software is learning to read résumés the way human recruiters do, evaluating keywords in context to make informed judgments about the quality and currency of the skills someone has included. If the system is searching for candidates with database design experience, for instance, it can tell whether somebody took a class in the subject ten years or ago or is currently applying those skills in a professional capacity.

From an applicant’s perspective, the best way to “beat the robots” is to stop trying to beat them. Don’t try to trick the system by including every keyword you can find or try to improve your odds by blasting your application to hundreds of openings. Instead, take the time to read job descriptions carefully so you can concentrate on the ones where you fit best and so you can understand employers’ needs well enough that you can explain how your skills and experience align with those needs. Even though you may have to go through a machine to get to an actual human, using the same audience-focused skills and techniques you’ve been practicing throughout this course is the best way to get there.1