Preparing for OCI Part II: Use Your Resume Effectively

Aug 10th, 2009 | By Josh Camson | Category: Featured, Law School, Lead Article

No doubt by now you have a résumé. In fact, you have hopefully had it looked over by your career services office, and hopefully a few other people. Get as many people to review your résumé as you can before you begin using it. Make sure to have people that don’t go to law school or have anything to do with the legal field review it as well. Every fresh pair of eyes will provide an even greater chance that no mistake goes unnoticed.

After you have a small army of proofreaders look over your résumé, don’t let it just gather digital dust in your My Documents folder. Put it to good use. Your résumé already explains your most recent work experience in an effective and concise way. Use those descriptions anywhere you can. Your LinkedIn profile should reflect all the same jobs as your résumé. Do you belong to any other social media networks where it is appropriate? Put on your experience and use the same job descriptions as you have on your résumé. This way you are saving yourself double work and maintaining consistency.

Now that you have all of your existing online profiles matching your résumé, you can also create a site where all that is displayed is your résumé. That way, if you are submitting applications digitally, you can give potential employers a link in addition to an attachment. You can also include the link in your e-mail signature, if that’s your style. The site I use is called VisualCV. It allows you to enter education, experience and everything else you would expect on a résumé. The cool thing is that VisualCV also allows custom sections where you can put anything you want. Need to list all the websites you write for? All the organizations you are a part of? You can do so with HTML formatting, so that employers can click the links and see what these organizations are. VisualCV also allows you to include pictures, galleries, Flickr feeds, YouTube videos and so forth. I would not recommending getting too crazy with these add-ons, as they may be a little flashy for some legal employers. Nonetheless, VisualCV is an easy-to-use way to get all your experience in one dedicated place.

The only down side to VisualCV is that you cannot embed your creation anywhere. Instead, you have to direct anyone to their site. What if, like me, you have your own website where you want to display your résumé? That is where PDFMeNot.com comes in. Either save your regular résumé as a PDF or export your VisualCV as a PDF and then use PDFMeNot.com to embed it in your site. It will only display one page at a time, but it is still a nice thing to embed and a way to get your résumé out there to anyone that visits your site.

Preparing for OCI Part I: A Sound Reputation