The 12 Posts of Christmas (#1: JobScan)

Wow. Hard to believe that 2015 will shortly be upon us, isn’t it?

As I reflect back on the past year in wistful fashion, I realize that I managed to bookmark quite a few interesting new career resources, tools, and topics that I had hoped at some point to write about, but never quite found the time to address.

So in light of this, and with a bit of whimsy, I’ve decided to wrap up my blogging efforts this year by piggybacking on the “12 Days of Christmas” theme and churning out a daily bite-size blog post around one of these new tools on each of the coming days leading up to Christmas.  In each post, I’ll quickly describe the resource and share a few quick impressions about it, for whatever it’s worth.

Happy holidays and hope you enjoy checking out some of these new resources…

Item #1: JobScan (http://www.jobscan.co)

As we all know, corporate America has come up with all sorts of ways (for better or worse) to speed up the process of screening resumes — the most significant of these being the use of computer-driven analysis to explore the match between a candidate’s resume keywords and the language cited within a specific job description.

The JobScan website you’ll find linked above represents this same sort of technology, but in reverse.  As you’ll note, you can use this tool to quickly paste all the text from your resume into one window on the screen, then paste in all the text from a target job description into another.  Once you do this, and run the analysis, the system will give you a precise breakdown of how your document stacks up and how closely your resume keywords map to the language of the opportunity in question.  It will even produce a specific itemized list of the keywords you missed so that you can calibrate your piece for even greater effectiveness, before submitting it.

The net/net?  While the computations being performed by this tool aren’t exactly rocket science or something an individual job seeker couldn’t replicate on their own, it’s awfully convenient to be able to run this kind of analysis with the click of a button.  If nothing else, the site “trains” job hunters to carefully examine the vocabulary of advertisements and appreciate how important a role such words play in the modern screening process. And while I’m a little skeptical of certain claims the site makes, such as that the average resume-screening system is unable to deal with any other header than “work experience” in terms of parsing one’s professional history, it’s still a neat tool — and one that many of you will find quite useful, I believe!