2006 NACE/Chevron Award Winner

The university career services (UCS) staff at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill realized there was a serious problem with some resumes created by the school’s students. While many students were bringing a resume draft to the office for a critique, others were not and were simply uploading their resumes directly into UCS’s data base. UCS decided to remedy the situation by developing the Optimal Resume-College Version, a user-friendly, web-based resume creation tool.

“A disturbingly large number of these resumes were so poorly written that they would undoubtedly hinder the student’s job or internship search, as well as embarrass the university,” says Marcia Harris, director of UCS. “We decided at that time that we had to take steps to address the situation.”

The first step, Harris explains, was to ensure that every resume submitted to the registration system was placed in a “holding bin” and reviewed by a counselor before being uploaded into the system and referred to an employer. Students with resumes that needed work were sent an automated e-mail encouraging them to meet with a counselor for assistance.

“The large volume of resumes to review was a burden on our counseling staff,” Harris notes. “However, we believed that this measure was necessary in order to improve the resume quality. While this was an acceptable immediate response to the problem, we were searching for a more proactive approach that would teach students how to develop a well-constructed resume, as well as reduce the number of resumes that needed remediation.”

Harris and her staff envisioned a web-based resume creation tool that would be easy to use; accessible at all times; flexible enough to address varied majors, degrees, and experiences/activities; and, most importantly, suitable for the college-level population. To create the system, they collaborated with Optimal Resume, an online resume service that offers flexible resume development.

“Optimal Resume-College Version allows our students to log into our web site and quickly and easily create a professional resume,” Harris explains. “These resumes represent our students’ qualifications in an effective manner. Furthermore, this tool helps our office meet the demand for resume assistance from 9,000 student registrants with just nine full-time career counselors.”

The tool is useful to students seeking part-time jobs, internships, and full-time post-graduate employment, as well as to those applying for fellowships and graduate/professional schools, and programs on campus that require a resume for application (e.g., application to the university’s undergraduate business program by sophomores).

The tool allows students to choose from nine formats for their resume and to select the categories for their resume from eight profile examples. Students may add or eliminate categories. Upon completion of their draft, students may spell check their resume and create three different versions of it: a Word version to upload into UCS’s data base, a plain text file version, and an interactive web site version in Flash.

Since the implementation of Optimal Resume-College Version in July 2005, more than 10,000 resumes have been created and uploaded by students using this tool. Harris says that the UCS staff overwhelmingly agrees that Optimal Resume-College Version has resulted in far superior resumes, taking much less time to critique and correct, as compared to resumes submitted prior to the implementation of the program.

Recruiters and students have also taken notice of the tool’s effectiveness and ease of use.

“In a survey of 101 campus recruiters conducted last fall, they rated the quality of our students’ resumes at 4.47 on a 1-5 scale,” Harris explains. “And in a recent survey of students who had created a resume with Optimal Resume, 87.7 percent rated their satisfaction as ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied,’ and 91.8 percent rated Optimal Resume as ‘easy to use’ or ‘very easy to use.’”