Create a Resume with Free Google Docs

Do you want to create a resume online?  I’ve found having my sales resume online to be a great way for recruiters to find me.  You can too with little or no knowledge of HTML using Google Docs.  If you know a little about HTML you can make your resume even better.  I want to provide a few tips on creating your online resume and how to make it search friendly.  By making your resume search friendly recruiters looking for workers with your skills and education can find you through search tools from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing).

Online Resume/CV

First lets talk about Google Docs.  Google Docs is a simple, intuitive and free word processing tool you can use to create your online resume.  Thought it’s not robust enough to replace Microsoft Word, I found it to be a much better tool for creating a web resume.

When I started I just copied the Word version of my resume into Google Docs.  While that worked it didn’t look anything like the original.  I ended up starting over by copying sections at a time vs. the whole resume and avoided using tables like I had with the Word version of the resume.

After I was happy with the result I simply told Google to publish the resume to the world… but nobody found it.  In fact when I Googled for it, I couldn’t find it either! Why?  Well there were a lot of reasons but the main reason was because the resume, as published by Google Docs, was not “search friendly”.  You may be have heard the term search engine optimization (SEO).  It’s a fancy phrase but don’t let it scare you.

There can be a lots of variables to get top search placement but there are also some very basic things you can do that can make a big impact.  Once I made some of those changes my resume started to appear in all kinds of search results and for the kinds of jobs I’m interested in being hired.

That’s enough for now, but if you want learn all about creating a search friendly resume subscribe to this blog!