English 420Y - Business Writing Online

Here is my cover letter. Open to comments and suggestions.

All comments and suggestions are well appreciated!

There were so many resumes!

There were a lot of articles to read. Some were pesimistic, while others were optimistic. In Career Journal aticle by an HR coordinator, the write would read less than half the resumes that crossed his desk. The resumes that don't survive the cut fall into two main categories: those that try his patience and those that tax his credulity. In chapter 27 of The Thomson Handbook, "Reading and Writing Email Purposefully", writing decisions should be based on the audience and situation.

I chose the resumes based on the following criteria.

General (In order of importance) – Applies to all
1. Clear Objective
2. Suits the job applying for?
3. Relevant Work Experience
4. Balance of Academics with other activities

Individual Resumes
1. Absolutely perfect for the position that he applied for. Perfect resume with respect to relevance
9. Extremely well catered to the job objective. Very balanced resume
20. Clear objective and relevant supporting material. The resume portrays balanced and hardworking person.

So my choices were....page 8, 13, 20, 28, and 31. Coming in a close sixth was page 2. A lot of things stood out to me during this excercise. First of all, after you get warmed up, skimming a resume for just a few seconds becomes pretty easy and you get good at quickly weeding out the weak resumes without even reading much content. Even if a resume makes it past this first 5-10 second glance, another 10-20 seconds is usually good enough to find some content that makes the resume qualify for the trash.

The five resumes that stood out amongst the rest were numbers 6, 8, 10, 20, and 26. Visually the had the correct amount of highlighting/italicizing, which was very eye appealing and easy to identify certain parts. These resumes had great alignment, nice spacing between each section, and focused their objective towards their prospective job position. Some other reasons for choosing these resumes were because of the conciseness, good indentations to make certain parts stand out, and honors/activities that show that they are well-rounded individuals.

When first reading over the resumes I noticed that not all of them were appealing to the eye. Some looked too spaced out while others were crammed in. I also did not like some of the formatting. I think it is key to make your format easy to read and pick out all the high points. If I had to look to hard for the information I wanted I just moved on to the next one. The ones I picked I felt all had good organization and the information was laid out in a easy to follow manner. They also had strong experience sections and a strong objective statement.

First off, I don’t know how this can be done in 10 minutes! I think this was a great activity, but sometimes it was a bit difficult comparing resumes with entirely different objectives. When I realized I was spending a little too much time on the first few I began rapidly looking through the rest of the stack. I feel that I was slightly biased on the first ones whereas I felt many of the last ones were a blur.

If I was an interviewer Choosing 5 resumes out of 34 resumes were not as difficult as I thought because as I was glancing through the bunch of resumes five resumes just stood out for me such as page numbers 2,7,8,17,22. These five resumes were very easy to read and I got pick up the information that I really wanted to get to fast. All the five resumes were well formatted for example the content of all the five resumes supported the object of the resumes.