Set aside your box of fancy resume-grade bond paper. A well-written, beautifully laid out, and carefully printed resume is no longer the key to a successful job hunt in the culinary world. Some food trucks or restaurants won’t even consider you for a position if you don’t post your culinary resume online.
To put your best foot forward in the electronic age, you have to learn how to write an electronic resume. That means ditching action verbs in favor of keyword nouns, trading pretty fonts in for Courier, and taking out tabs to put in spaces.
Why post your culinary resume online?
Most employers, especially in the high tech mobile food industry, are looking for candidates online. Some mobile food companies won’t even consider you for a given position if you don’t post your resume online. They view a printed resume as a sign that you’re not comfortable with email, computers, or the Web. On the positive side, posting your resume online will get your resume in the door and in the right hands as quickly and efficiently as possible. And you don’t have to limit yourself to one page!
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Where you can post your culinary resume online
These days, there are numerous online resume banks covering just about every industry. There are sites that are essentially databases of resumes; making your search for the right site a little easier. Most resume databases invite culinary job seekers to post resumes for free, so be sure to avoid sites that charge a fee; there’s no reason to pay for something you can get for free.
How to post a culinary resume online
Most of the time, when you post a culinary resume online, you fill out several fields, such as name, address, phone number, email address. Then you paste the bulk of your resume into a big scrolling text box. Most sites require you to paste only plain text. Mobile Cuisine allows you to paste HTML, which can make for a better looking end product if you know what you’re doing.
Posting a text resume
When you’re pasting plain text into a text box, make sure to follow these guidelines:
- Don’t use any special characters or symbols, such as smart quotes or mathematical symbols.
- Left justify everything in your resume.
- If you must indent, don’t use tabs; use spaces instead.
- Put in a hard break at the end of every line; don’t let words wrap to the next line.
- Use Courier, if possible, and no other fonts.
- Save your document as a text file.
- Spell check your resume before you save it.
If you include hyperlinks or images in your document, make sure you include the whole name of the link. This is called using “absolute,” rather than “relative,” references.
How to write an online resume
You’ve probably been told a million times to use good action verbs in your printed resume. Throw that advice out when you go to write your online resume for a culinary job. The most important thing you can do for yourself when you’re writing a resume that you plan to post online is to use really good keywords; most of which are nouns, not verbs.
Don’t lie or exaggerate
Even though keywords are, well, key, you don’t want to misuse them. If you create multiple online resumes using different keywords, you’re going to get caught; and employers will feel as if you don’t know what you want to do with your career. Also, don’t put in skills you don’t have, particularly culinary skills.
If you are a food truck owner with job openings, you can post your job here at Mobile Cuisine. Food Truck Jobs is an easy way to get your openings filled by people interested in the food truck industry.
The Bottom Line
If you are looking for a culinary job and you don’t have direct contacts with people within the industry, posting your resume online is a quick and easy way to get your background in front of business owners with job openings.
Did we miss any important tips to posting a culinary resume online? If so, please let us know. Share your thoughts and ideas with us in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Twitter | Facebook.
