This is a great article about adding volunteer work into your web resume. It comes from the University of Texas and is written by Susan Ellis. As always with the Dynamic Web Resume, we take these great lessons and translate them into a web resume format. That means you should take your volunteer experience and bring it to life by adding pictures or video onto your web resume volunteer section. If you have any questions on how to bring your resume alive please contact us at Donny@DynamicWebResume.com.

Put Volunteer Work on Your Resume

When you are looking for a job, your resume gets your foot in the door. It represents you to a potential employer and you want it to stand out from the resumes of the other applicants. One way to capture the interest of an employer is to show that you are an involved citizen — someone who works to make the community a better place to live. In other words, make sure your volunteer work appears on your resume.

Writing a cover letter for a web resume is a little different than for a paper resume. First off, you have to understand the scope of readers you will have on your web resume. More people will be seeing your web resume so you have to write your cover letter a little more generalized. You still should focus on your acheivements and quantifying your experience. But, when it comes to defining your career goals and objectives you must leave a lot for the reader to fill-in. If your too specific on the job you desire then you may elimate yourself from those random job offers that may steer you in another direction. Many Dynamic Web Resume customers contact us with a story of how they recieved a job offer from a random company who was searching for a new employee!

In the past when people focused on making their resume dynamic they meant putting action words and quantifying their experience. These things are great, but with a web resume you can get a lot more dynamic than that! Why not post a picture of yourself receiving an award right next to your accomplishments section where you state your award? They say a picture’s worth a thousand words; I say a picture’s worth at least a couple interviews!

This is another topic that web resumes have really changed compared to old school paper resumes. At Dynamic Web Resume, we highly suggest that you use a professional looking headshot picture on your web resume. You focus and our focus when making your web resume is to give the potential employer as much information about you as possible. What you look like is definitely part of that information. An employer feels more comfortable knowing what you look like when going into an interview. They reviewed your web resume seen your friendly and professional looking picture and are comfortable when they meet your for an interview. During the interview you want the interviewer to be focused on your qualifications not the fact that you look different than they expected.

In your experience section of your resume you have years of tasks you have done that show yourself as an employee. You cannot “beef” that section up over the weekend. But, you can add other extras to your resume that will help you rise above your competition.

As resume professionals we, at Dynamic Web Resume, feel that employers see the same things over and over again on resumes. I work at company A for X years, worked really hard, did really well, and am ready to move into a position with more responsibility. There isn’t much you can do with your work experience when it comes to variety. Naturally, employers’ eyes will fall onto the extras of your web resume. The extras in a web resume are where you can get really creative and dazzle whoever is reviewing your resume.