What is Jobmine? Jobmine is the online matching system that the University provides for Co-op students. It turns out that Googling the word Jobmine and jumping a few pages in is an oddly easy way of locating UW student blogs than the more obvious search terms, since it seems that many of them have weighed in with an opinion.

Under the cover of anonymity, some are just plain cruel. Others are more tactful, although still expressing their displeasure. Still more use an image to make their statement.

However people feel about it, one of the biggest challenges of Jobmine for most is that you must submit a resume… in HTML format. For those having never used HTML before, this is a daunting task, but some of us are like fish in water. I just thought I’d share a few tips for creating a really great CSS/XHTML resume. The example above is my own with the content and some of the extraneous flair stripped out. I’ve tested it, and it displays in IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and Firefox. Features to draw your attention to:

• Print Media Rules. For clients that support print-media stylesheets, the typeface is switched from a sans-serif to Times New Roman. To see this and the effect below, select File->Print Preview.
• Link Expansion. When printed, the ‘link’ in the document has a second part, the actual URL, which is revealed. Onscreen, this is hidden, but in print, it appears.
• Horizontal Lists. The three columns of traits is an attractive presentation, and one easily acheived with a table. However, doing it with a horizontal list is advantageous because you can’t always predict what will happen to your resume if it’s sent as an attachment in HTML-email, and then forwarded as text-email. A table would break all over the place, but the nested lists downgrade graciously.

So there you have it. Obviously, there’s a lot more tricks to be done with CSS to create interesting and visually appealing text-only layouts, but I just created this as a basic example of what can be done.

Mike

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