ResumeBuilder™

A good resume is the cornerstone of any effective job search – in fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that resumes are the currency of the job market, a prerequisite for anyone who wishes to successfully sell their skills, experience, and other qualifications in an increasingly challenging economy. Employers expect that candidates will provide their resumes at the initial point of contact, regardless of how the connection is made (e.g. online job posting, networking, etc.) – it’s as simple as that. But beyond meeting employer expectations, resumes provide job seekers with a tangible basis for career exploration as well as for job search – enabling them to catalog transferable skills and to see how their experiences, capabilities, and credentials line up against live opportunities.

Yet creating a good resume can be a significant challenge for many job seekers, especially if they are just starting out in their careers, lack writing skills or simply lack confidence in their writing ability. Even experienced job seekers can face writer’s block when it comes time to update their resumes and deal with questions such as “Which of my skills and experience would be most interesting to a prospective employer?”, “How can I showcase my strengths in order to better compete with other candidates?”, and of course “That job was five years ago – how can I describe it when I can’t remember all my responsibilities?”.

ResumeBuilder provides the answers to all of these questions and more. The application requires absolutely no writing skills, instead relying on a prompt-and-response approach to elicit important descriptive information from the user. No one knows the job market from top to bottom like Burning Glass’s analytic software; our technology has developed a comprehensive and detailed knowledge of thousands of jobs by reading and analyzing millions of resumes and job descriptions. ResumeBuilder puts that knowledge into the hands of even the most inexperienced job seekers, helping them to build descriptive and professionally formatted resumes which can be exported as a PDF or Word file (suitable for printing or attaching to an email), while also providing the basis for job matching and career exploration activities within Focus/Career™.

ResumeBuilder is available as a standalone application or as a component module of the Focus/Career suite of job search and career development solutions.

• Builds a professionally-formatted resume without requiring the job seeker to write, dynamically creating a personalized interview about each prior work experience with questions designed to highlight transferable skills and the kinds of experiences real employers are asking for.
• Just upload an existing resume and Resume/Builder™ pre-fills registration forms while also providing an “Extreme Resume Makeover”, suggesting skills and work activities that may have been overlooked and options for reformatting using a variety of compelling presentation templates.
• ResumeBuilder guides the job seeker through the process of accurate O*NET coding of each of their work experiences by providing predictive suggestions and a simple “tree” structure for job seekers who wish to explore alternatives to those suggestions.
• Users are prompted to respond to yes/no or multiple choice questions based on a specified job title; optional “open questions” are also provided to elicit more detail from users who wish to provide it.
• Questions are predictively drawn from a database of over 20,000 questions. They are written in easy-to-read (5th- 7th grade level) language based upon analysis and review of hundreds of job openings and resumes from each occupation. They reflect a real-time awareness of the skills, experiences, and qualifications currently required by actual employers and expressed by those successfully placing, as observed in millions of job transitions.
• Once the interview is complete, descriptive statements are “written” by the system in a detailed, personalized style.
• Resume/Builder supports a variety of popular formats, including chronological and functional, enabling job seekers to select the format that best highlights their strengths and most marketable qualifications.
• For those job seekers who wish to supplement work experience and education with other relevant experience and skills, ResumeBuilder supports many other sections, including Technical Skills, Licenses, Certifications, Languages, Publications, Volunteer Activities, etc.

Burning Glass	Others
ResumeBuilder develops a descriptive, professionally-formatted resume without requiring the job seeker to write.	Other tools require job seekers to write a job description for each job. This requires considerable literacy as well as the ability to articulate transferable skills. As a result, many of the resulting resumes are poorly written and/or contain thin job descriptions, significantly restricting their usefulness in facilitating job placement. This also imposes an additional burden on counseling staff, who must spend time supplementing clients’ resumes with better written, more descriptive content.
ResumeBuilder helps job seekers articulate transferable skills by generating a personalized structured-response interview for each prior work experience, with multiple choice or yes/no questions designed to highlight transferable skills and the kinds of experiences real employers require.	Other tools provide general advice on how to write a job description or think about work activities. None of the suggestions are personalized to reflect the specific experience of the individual job seeker.
ResumeBuilder also provides support for job seekers with existing resumes. Using patented SNLP (artificial intelligence) technology, the application knows how to read, understand, and extract key information from free text. Once a job seeker uploads an existing resume, ResumeBuilder suggests work experiences and skills they may have forgotten and helps them reformat the document in a polished, employer-ready template.	Other tools focus exclusively on developing resumes from scratch. These systems are not capable of reading and extracting information from free text so it’s impossible for them to work with existing resumes. At best, they provide functionality for the user to cut text from an existing document and then paste it into the tool – but it’s not automatic. Their inability to understand free text also means that they can’t suggest improvements or enhancements, nor can they recognize possible omissions (i.e. skills the job seeker is likely to have but forgot to mention).
ResumeBuilder interviews have been created from scratch based upon a thorough review of thousands of actual job postings and resumes – querying job seekers in clear, simple language about the skills and experiences that matter to real employers and/or that are referenced by those who successfully place.	Other tools rely on O*NET work statements or other standard skill or task catalogs. This is problematic because O*NET-type work statements were designed to facilitate taxonomy of generalized work activities. As a result, they can be difficult to understand for both job seekers and employers and do not necessarily articulate work skills in terms of transferability.