By Riges Younan

Part 2 of using referrals for college recruiting by Dr John Sullivan on ERE

By Riges Younan

A nice little piece in the Herald Sun on Saturday 20th here

By Riges Younan

With the increasing use of technology for the screening, matching and the sourcing part of the recruiting process your resume will increasingly not be read by a human until after it is read, parsed, and classified by a computer. So forget about the pretty graphics and nice borders because it may look like good to the hiring manager or recruiter but it looks like this ‘;anf;oasdfpoahs;gasfughv;asdnfg;asubfg;auhd’ to the computer (and just in case you are like me, not technical.. that’s not code.. it’s just me telling you that it’s a mess).

Here’s what to remember

1. You resume must be in Microsoft Word format. Not HTML, PDF, WordPerfect or RTF.

2. Looks are deceiving: Plain is good, Fancy is bad. No headers & footers, no graphics, no tables in Word, no fields in Word - and don’t use resume templates particularly resume templates from Microsoft (sorry Gatesy!)

3. Don’t mix font types or size for data. Sounds boring I know but it’s the actual content not the way that the content looks that’s important to recruiters and hiring managers.

4. Capitalisation does matter. Don’t use CAPS unless you need to.

5. See what your resume looks like in plain text. Resume systems convert the resumes into plain text and then they read and process plain text.

6. Contact info comes first. If you want a job, let people know how they can get in touch to chat.

7. Use common header terms to start resume sections. [Job Objective] [Education]

8. Don’t use columns or tables for formatting anything.

9. Keep like data in order. [Dates] [Company] [Position Title] [Description]

10. Do not combine sections.

11. Always end company names with common company name words. eg Pty Ltd, Inc, LLC, Ltd.

12. Omit page numbers.

13. Put skills into work history descriptions. eg: Sales, Developer, HTML, CSS, Management etc

14. Don’t put references on your resume, EVER.

These are some high level points. When you sign up as a member on 2Vouch there is a link to a much more detailed document with specific examples in the “Update My Profile’ tab.

There’s been a sighting of the JobGenie on High St in Prahran getting ready for this Friday’s MTUB event. Gotta say the mow and the earing does suit him..  anyone else seen him? best photo sent in to info@2vouch.com by the end of October wins a Wii.

By Riges Younan

A nice little piece by SmartCompany on us here

We are sponsoring some events over the coming weeks and the 2Vouch crew would love meet you and say G’day. There is a rumour that the JobGenie could be making his first public appearance at one of these events! BTW a Wii is on offer to the person who sends the best picture of themselves with the JobGenie by the 31st of Oct to info@2Vouch.com

MTUB’s ( Melbourne Twitter Underground Brigade) PirateTUB event this Friday 19th in Melbourne.

AussieTUB an STUB event on Thursday 25th in Sydney

Webjam is back with Webjam8 on Thursday 25th in Sydney

By Riges Younan

Here is an interesting post by Louise of UK Recruiter fame about Video CV’s and discrimination in the recruiting process. My view is that video CV’s may increase the chances of discrimination earlier in the recruiting process assuming the recruiter/hirer has time to view the CV in the first place. Secondly, in a market where the supply and demand equation is still heavily in favour of the supply side ( and I don’t see that changing materially in the short to medium term) what type of candidates have the time to sit and record a video CV in the first place.. certainly not the highly sought after ‘passive’ (don’t like term that much but anyway) candidates.. why? because they are too busy doing what they do best… WORKING!.. what do you think?

By Riges Younan

Jason Davis and Cheezhead talk referrals and ‘how they are the lifeblood of recruiting’ you can listen here. Now, I don’t agree with Jason that referrals need to be anonymous because if I was receiving a referral for a job,  I would want to know who referred that person? and why they think they are a match? This would allow me to qualify the quality of that referral.

We promise there won’t be this many posts every day, but hey, we are excited and it seems that there is a lot of interest in what we are doing

Thanks to Renai LeMay at Bootstrapper for this review.

As you can imagine, building a site like 2Vouch is not a trivial exercise. A lot of people have put in a lot of hard work and we just want to acknowledge them publicly and say a huge THANK YOU!

One of the great things has been the support and effort put in by our development team, designers and html/css guys. All nighters, lots of back & forth and very high expectations… again, thanks to all of you.

The other thing that has been exciting has been telling the 2Vouch story to our launch partners and having people take a leap of faith to support us before we even had a site live. This includes some of the leading charities in Australia, industry associations and of course advertisers - some of the most innovative, leading recruiting firms and businesses in the online space.

Our launch charity partners are:

• The Salvation Army
• Diabetes Victoria
• The Heart Foundation
• The Breast Cancer Network
• Sids & Kids

Referrers can automatically make donations to any of these charities when they process their referral rewards.

We have had great support from:

• The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association
• The Game Developers Association of Australia
• The Recruiting & Consulting Services Association
• JobAdder
• Pollenizer (Phil, Mick & Bruno)

And our launch clients

• S2M Digital
• Happener
• Online Recruiting
• Reactive
• eServices Interactive
• Tantalus Media

Finally, and certainly not least, to our friends and families who have heard us talk about this idea for ages… thank you for putting up with us.

Cheers,

Riges.

Thanks to those of you who have provided early feedback to us privately. We have had some really positive input and also a bunch of great ideas for making 2Vouch even better.

The other wonderful thing has been to read the comments and ideas that different bloggers have posted. Two more posts since yesterday are on Mashable and CareersThatDontSuck (love that domain )