Are you planning your job search or expecting to get lucky?

Here is an example of a good plan…

• Get a calendar and journal, and start to document your daily activity. If you don’t track your activity, there is no way for you to make a good decision if you need to change something.
• Make contact with AT LEAST 5 new people a day that have influence on the hiring process. Not through a job ad, but on the phone or in person. This can be done by using services like Jigsaw, Linkedin, Zoominfo, and ResumeSpider. Each has a unique system for building a network.
• Setup job alerts on SimplyHired, Indeed, and Jobster. These services aggregate jobs from multiple boards, which saves you time from scouring hundreds of job boards.
• Go to at least one networking event a week AND meet people. You can find a listing of networking events in your local paper.
• Read one book a week that has a positive influence on your attitude.
• Subscribe to blogs and newsletters that are in your targeted industry or discipline. This is another way to stay connected and know what is going on in your field.

Are you doing these tasks? If not, get out of your rut and start a plan today.

All these activities take work and time, and WILL yield results.

Don’t expect to get lucky like this guy…

Many job boards and resume distribution services, require you to have a text version of your resume.  A text or ASCII formatted resume can add tremendous value to your job search and here is why…

• Text resumes have a higher chance of passing through a spam filter when embedded into an email and not used as an attachment.
• Many employers use automated software to receive and parse resumes into their database.  Text resumes are easily converted and no important keywords in your resume are lost.
• Job board databases are sold to employers so they can search resumes.  A text resume has a higher chance of being found because the data is cleaner versus a Word or PDF document that needs to be electronically translated into searchable data by the job board’s software.

If you simply try to copy & paste the information from a Word document into the text field of a job application, your resume format and spacing will drastically change.  In addition, special formatting symbols, like bullets, will be replaced with unrecognizable symbols.

Here is an easy procedure you can use to create a formatted ASCII text resume from a Microsoft Word resume.

1. Open your resume in MS Word
2. Click on ‘File’ and select ‘Save As’
3. In the ‘Save As’ window, change file type to ‘Plain Text’, and then click the Save button
4. After the File Conversion window appears, change the text encoding to ‘Other encoding’ and ‘US-ASCII’, check-off ‘Allow character substitution’, and then click the OK button

This produces an ASCII text document with proper formatting that you can email or copy & paste into any text field.