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How Monster.com Reformats Your Resume
Skiilight sometimes crawls Monster.com looking for companies that think they need someone in-house for their marketing. In reality, our firm can provide the same solutions with less overhead – so in these cases we say hello and offer our services. Naturally, I have a Monster.com account (and a LinkedIn!). So recently I had just completed a resume overhaul and was proud of my work. I’d spent all evening rearranging information and cutting out what didn’t need to be there. Being in design and communications (and knowing how to manipulate MS Word), I built a resume that conveyed my information beautifully.
So, I uploaded my resume to Monster and like Godzilla to Tokyo, powerlines started falling and I could hear the screams of people running away. Monster ignored a good majority of my formatting, forcing my resume to two pages and destroying my carefully-honed style in the process.
What happened?
Through trial and error, I have decided that the following is what goes on behind the scenes when you upload your Word resume to Monster.com
- Monster does not care that you changed the margins. They will revert to the default margin size.
- Monster has no interest in your bullet styles. It will default to Symbol, size 12.
- Because of this, any line spacing less than single space will be lost on the line with the bullet. Curiously, Monster DOES respect your line spacing setting, but the 12pt type size will force the bulleted line to a miniumum of single space. If that initial bulleted line continues into a second line, the second line will retain the line spacing. In my case, .8.
- Monster will not retain any images that may be in your resume.
- Monster will force any header or footer information into the body area. Don’t even try to gain that little bit of extra space.
Fig. 1 – Original Resume
Fig. 2 – Edited to comply with Monster’s reformatting.
Note line spacing difference. My 0.8 line spacing is retained for first job description,
ignored in second job description because of the size 12 bullet.
Fig. 3 – How Monster displays it in HTML. (note the line spacing and bullets)
Even though the line spacing looks incorrect in Fig. 3, once downloaded from the link above (“Download Job Seeker’s Word Resume”), the Word doc will display correct(er) line spacing, as shown in Fig. 2.
So, I hope this might be an interesting read to anyone who may have wrestled with Monster’s formatting in the past.
Happy Holidays from Skiilight Interactive
Happy holidays from Skiilight Interactive! We hope your holiday is filled with warmth. Naturally, should you have any business-related New Year’s resolutions, we’d love to hear about them!
Barack Obama FTW!
Unless you’re a marketing insider (or at least a subscriber to Advertising Age) you may have missed that Barack Obama not only won the election but also won Marketer of the Year as awarded by the Association of National Advertisers. His competition? Apple, Nike, Zappos, Coors, and, yes, John McCain.
The Obama brand is likely the first example of a complex and cohesive marketing campaign that treated design as a top priority. It was up to the design team to create an image of hope and change and it was up to the candidate to show voters that his campaign wasn’t only about style, but also about content.
In looking at the Obama logo, it is easy to see that its simplicty lends itself to a favorable comparision to a few other iconic logos of respected brands. The reason a brand succeeds is based on a few different factors, none of which are more important than the emotional connection a brand can build with its constituent. Obama wanted to sell the American people on hope. Using great marketing to build a solid brand with special focus to a cohesive look and advanced design – he did just that.
A great list
I love lists. They’re all over the internet and quite often find themselves at the top of Digg. This one is from Megan Casey, which I found through Seth Godin’s blog. The original is here (but copied and pasted below): http://blogs.squidoo.com/squidblog/?p=276
“People online are real people.
If you send a nasty email, there’s a real human being on the other end who gets it.
If you flame in a forum, you’re wasting real people’s time.
If you spam someone, you’re really only making yourself look bad.
If you write IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS it sounds like shouting.
If you want something to happen your way, try asking instead of demanding.
If you give, you’ll probably wind up getting, too.
If you blog just to pick fights, don’t be surprised when people don’t trust you.
If you collaborate, say thanks.
If you’re independent, say no thanks.
If you like someone, tell them.
If you don’t, walk away from the computer.
If you’re giving feedback, lead with just one good thing.
If you’re getting feedback, realize that the person must care a lot to have sent it.
If you goof, apologize.
If you apologize, mean it.
If you smile, mean that too.
If you don’t like something, don’t do it.
If you do like something, spread it.
But far far more important:
Give people a break.
The break you probably deserve yourself.
People are out to do good, 99% of the time.
You probably are too.
Say thanks out loud and a lot.
Try making someone’s day.
Chances are they’ll make yours in return.”
Megan’s list seems so simple, but sometimes people forget what they learned in Kindergarten and interaction takes a nose dive. Conducting business and interacting with customers (and friends and family and so on…) in an honest an sincere way is the best way to build a brand people will want to talk about.
The learnings of our childhood, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” don’t apply to business. You’d better give them something nice to say or else they will, without a doubt, tell everyone the bad things. You never get a second chance – well you know the rest.
Common Restaurant Take-away: Stress
Any marketing professional will tell you that your brand is defined by how your customer “feels” about your company. As a design firm, we focus heavily on closing the project and implementing our solutions flawlessly. The successful completion of a project allows our customer to be happy and for us to maintain a good working relationship. If we designed the greatest website and/or identity package but botched the implementation, our client would take that memory home with them. They would likely not recommend us – and we wouldn’t deserve to be recommended.
People go out to eat to take a break. Work is hard. Cleaning up after cooking is a chore. A trip to a restaurant (nice or not) is a treat, and the customer deserves to be treated correctly.
I was recently out with friends at a Sushi restaurant which offered a few “Rules of the House” on the front page of the menu. One of these “rules” stated that only one check will be delivered to the table, no exceptions. That’s okay, considering my party frequently splits the check by supplying two or more credit cards, depending on how many are in said party. This night, there were four. We understood and could accomodate this “rule of the house.”
After a relaxing dinner, our bill arrived. Yet another surprise “Rule of the House” greeted us when we opened the black check holder. “No more than two credit cards allowed.” On the surface, this isn’t such a travesty, but let’s approach this from a emotional branding point of view.
The rules that management has decided to place onto the customer’s shoulders negatively effects the customer’s view of the restaurant. Because the surprise rule created a stressful situation at the very end of the night, the customer won’t be thinking about how pleasant the waiter was or possibly even how good the food was; they’ll think only of how unnecessarily difficult it was to split the check.
Building walls for your customers to scale is not the way to create a relaxing user-experience. A restaurant employs “servers.” These people are there to take care of the customer and provide the face for your brand. Since when did it become okay for the business to decide in what ways I’ll pay for the services they are obligated to perform? If you run a restaurant, stop alienating your customers and accept whatever form of payment they wish. Don’t send your customer home with a grey cloud over their head just because you want to save a few cents on your merchant services charge. Your brand might not be the only thing that suffers.
Restaurant owners take note: Word of mouth now extends worldwide. A customer burned will tell the world with the help of Yelp!, Judy’s Book, City Search, etc. A bad experience will be shared!
SEO is human friendly too.
Search Engine Optimization doesn’t only optimize websites for crawlers, it optimizes websites for people too! Humans utilize visualization and familiar terms to remember web addresses. SEO aids in this by providing simple URLS that perform complex functions.
For example, let’s say I created a PHP script that retrieved information about cities. Since there are many cities with the same name, I’d have to include state also. My PHP script URL may look something like this: mywebsiteaboutcities.com/index.php?state=WA&city=Seattle&timezone=Western. This URL is non-SEO friendly and very hard to remember. The average person isn’t going to remember all the ?’s &’s and =’s.
With the aid of SEO we can change this address to mywebsiteaboutcities.com/WA/Seattle/ and the users can then catch on and utilize the site in a whole new way. Even if there are links or not, a user could simply change /WA/ to /TX/ and /Seattle/ to /Dallas/ without having any programming knowledge and receive information about Dallas, TX.
Now, if your site information is worthy, in human conversation among friends someone could communicate your URL. All parties in the conversation could easily remember how to navigate to your website information on Dallas, TX thanks to our friendly neighborhood superhero, SEO.
Missed opportunity
Continuing with real world examples of how companies are missing the point of error messages, I offer this example from the Urban Outfitters online store.
This image was posted while the online store was offline. They’re missing a great opportunity to redirect interested parties to other areas of the site.
- Why not send these shoppers to the Urban Outfitters blog where they can get fashion tips and ideas for outfit combinations while they wait to shop?
- Introduce them to new products and tell them why they should care (why they should purchase).
- Why not let them enter their email address for the newsletter?
- Allow them to browse on the site and have an instant message system set up so that they will be alerted when the store is back online.
Never miss an opportunity – there’s no guarantee that they won’t find something similar at an online store that’s not down. Keep them entertained – keep them on your site.
Error messages are important
You may have a perfectly-coded site with no broken links, but you can’t expect every page to stay on your server forever nor can you expect those linking to your site to remember the “l” in “.html”. Someone else’s typo can derail any hopes of word-of-mouth advertising from those who are enthusiasts of your site. Lets look at two examples at random:
Done Well:
Here we see that CNN has wrapped their site with their normal navigation and design so that you always know the site is legitimate and have the opportunity to find the page for which you were looking – or navigate to another area of the site. This keeps their visitor on CNN.com even after his or her initial disappointment in not finding the originally intended page.
Done Poorly:
Here we see the University of Washington’s error page displaying nothing similar to their main pages and offering no navigation. In this situation, the visitor is not as likely to stay on the site – they have been met with a brickwall, courtesy of your site.
The user’s experience should be a fluid as possible. Even when they get a little lost they should feel like you’re looking out for their interests. Hopefully no one that visits your site will ever see your error message, but it’s very important that they’re there just in case.
We practice what we preach! Go ahead, try this broken link to see our error page.
The best way to lose a customer
Abandoning a customer with a full shopping cart is always a good way to do it. Example #8,290 of how support makes or breaks a sale.