Sunday, August 10, 2008

Resume Clinic at the Grace Hopper Celebration

Like many of you, I have friends who are job hunting. The number one thing everyone struggles with when they start a job search, at any level, is that they need to update their resume and some have to create a whole new resume. From this came the idea of creating a Resume Clinic as a part of our Recession Proofing Your Career events on the first day of GHC.

We've been recruiting volunteers from our academic and industry sponsors to work at the Resume Clinic. These volunteers are recruiters who have come to GHC to help find interns, hire new employees and recruit PhD program candidates. They are all experts on what makes a great technical resume/CV and are eager to help our attendees improve their resumes. And these are all great people to make a part of your network.

So, how will it work? We'll be opening our doors at 2:30 in the Silvers Room on Wednesday October 1st. We will have at least 10 resume consultants working at any time. Please come in and sign up for 20 minute slot. We'll be open until 5:30 so we'll have 90 slots open on a first come first serve basis When you come for your session please bring a printed copy of your resume. Your resume will be reviewed and you'll receive feedback. Then you can make edits on your laptop and stop by the Keystone Business Center and print new copies of your resume for your interviews or to distribute to the companies/universities.

For those of you who are writing your first resume or are revising your resume, check out our GHC site for our article on Writing a Technical Resume to give you some ideas to get started. A few extra tips are:

  • Spell check your resume. Typos can cause a resume to go to the bottom of the stack quickly. Not a great speller - find a friend who is and ask them to proofread for you.
  • Bring plenty of printed resumes to GHC. Some recruiters last year complained that they met potential candidates but without a resume they weren't able to easily brief hiring managers.
  • Plan ahead. Check out the company websites before you go to GHC and find out what they are looking for. Create a priority list of companies you want to meet with and make it happen.
  • Submit your resume to our resume database as soon as you have it ready. Our Resume Clinic will help you with your resume on site but prior to coming to GHC our sponsor companies are going through our resume database to identify candidates and schedule interviews on site. Last year one of our sponsors made 18 job offers in a single day.

I look forward to seeing you all at the Resume Clinic.

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