Optimal Resume Blog

Are you searching for email marketing inspiration for your users?  If not, we think you will be soon.  We recently added over 15 new email templates into the Admin System!  In addition, many of the existing templates have been updated to incorporate more relevant information about our products and services.  These email templates are a great way to introduce users to OptimalResume and to boost traffic to your website.

Find the email templates under the Contact section of the Admin System

All email templates can be found by selecting the “Contact” tab in the Admin System. From there, select the “Email Templates” link.  Some of the updates we’ve made include:

• Promotional templates for individual OptimalResume modules. If you are seeking to boost interest in a specific program, such as OptimalEfolio or OptimalInterview, we now have templates designed for each individual product.
• Online Recruiting templates. We’ve added content for our Online Recruiting users, including emails for employers, and emails regarding the approval or denial of job campaigns.
• New templates for College and University customers. We’ve added a handful of templates for our higher education customers, including notifications of upcoming career fairs, “welcome back” emails for a new semester, and pre-graduation emails for seniors.
• Introductory messages. If you are a new customer of OptimalResume, we added extra templates to help introduce this service to your job seekers. Templates such as the “Introducing OptimalResume” message highlight the features available to users and how they can learn more.

As always, administrators can edit these templates to meet the needs of their individual career center, or add entirely new templates of their own.  Email templates can be paired with the Optimal Newsletter tool (also located under the Contact tab) to schedule mass emails to groups of current or potential users.  Contact your customer service representative to learn more about creating and editing your own email templates.

Filed under: Products & Updates, Resources & Tutorials by Katie Lempicke
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For many of our high school and college-age customers, we’re in the home stretch before graduation and summer break. If your summer career or internship plans are not finalized yet, OptimalResume has features to help with the details of your resume:

• Document Cloning – A well-written resume is a beautiful thing, but a well-written resume tailored to the employer receiving it is even more lovely. Many Optimal career centers encourage candidates to adapt their resume to appeal to the individual employer or position they are applying to. To help with that, Optimal provides a cloning tool in the Resume and Letter Builders. Cloning a document allows the user to make changes to it independently of the original. So a job seeker could clone their current resume, then adapt the clone to meet the employer’s unique interests.
• Styling Palette – Style can be a big influence on an employer’s perception of a resume and candidate.  The Styling Palette in the Resume and Letter Builders provides thousands of options for tailoring the appearance of your resume. Choose from pre-styled templates, or use the custom tabs to create a unique look for your resume. We recommend selecting a style that makes your resume appear clean and easy to read.  You can view a Styling Palette tutorial here.
• Website Builder – If you’re sharing a resume online, we encourage you to use the Website Builder to design a professional resume website. The Website Builder allows you to add any documents created in OptimalResume to a custom-branded website. To spice things up, we even added 13 new templates to the Website Builder, providing more style options to complement your documents.  Here’s an example of a website using one of our new templates.

In addition, use the optional Review Center to submit your resume to a career counselor at your school. If you’ve made updates to your resume since your last trip to the Review Center, you also have the option of resubmitting the document. Just return to your Review Center menu and select the “Resubmit Document for Review” option.

Whether you’re new to job searching, or making last-minute refinements to existing documents, OptimalResume provides the features to help you succeed.

Filed under: For Job Seekers by Katie Lempicke
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If you use our Online Recruiting system, you’ll be excited to hear about our new sharing tools for job campaigns.  Admins are now able to share a job campaign with potential candidates through email or social media portals.  When viewing a campaign under the “Online Recruiting” tab, look for the sharing buttons at the top right corner.

Use the email tool to share a campaign directly with a candidate, or use the Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn buttons to post a campaign on your career center’s social media pages.  Contact and application information is hidden on campaigns posted publicly on social media pages to ensure that only your registered users can apply.  Applicants must be registered users of your OptimalResume website and must be logged in to view application information.  Here’s an example of what a campaign looks like when it’s shared (please note this is a test campaign and is not an actual internship opportunity). Contact your customer service representative to learn more about this feature, or if you are interested in adding Online Recruiting to your OptimalResume system.

Campaigns may be the newest thing to share in our system, but they’re certainly not the only thing you can share in OptimalResume:

• Sharing Announcements – Use the announcements area to promote career center events to your OptimalResume users.
• Sharing Samples – Sample resume templates can be shared on social media websites to encourage users to look through the content in their Resume Builder.  You’ll see similar options in the Letter Builder as well.
• Sharing Documents – Users in OptimalResume can share their individual documents using the Share button in any OptimalResume program.  This is a quick and easy way to share a document online, although our Website Builder can provide some additional settings if you’re looking for something a little more polished.

Filed under: Career Centers using Optimal, Resources & Tutorials by Katie Lempicke
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Last week, we added a selection of new templates to our Portfolio Builder!  These templates demonstrate unique portfolio layouts, showing job seekers how to best organize their files.  Like our resume and letter templates, portfolio templates are a great solution for a job seeker who may not be familiar with the program or with creating a portfolio in general.

The templates we provide are designed to show different scenarios in which a portfolio may be needed.  Some of these templates include:

• Chronological Portfolios – like a chronological resume, these templates arrange files by the most recent contributions.
• Professional Portfolios – designed to hold documents needed for a job application, such as resumes, lists of references, and writing samples.
• Admissions Portfolios – great for job seekers applying to college or graduate school, and include items such as transcripts, research, and academic contributions.
• Creative Portfolios – showcase a user’s creative and design skills by arranging files by media type.

For existing customers, portfolio templates must be enabled through the Admin System.  In the Admin System, click on the “Website Config” tab, then “User Desktop”, then “Samples” (note: you must have an Organization Admin level account to access this area).  Under the Portfolio tab, you’ll see our available global templates – just check the box next to any you wish to enable and click the “Set Selected As Samples” button below.  Did you know you can also use this area to create your own custom portfolio templates?  That’s a discussion for another blog post.

Once you enable portfolio templates, users will be able to select a “Browse Templates” menu when creating a new portfolio.

Users will be able to browse through any enabled templates before making a final selection, including any custom templates created by the career center.

We’re excited to bring these new templates to our customers, and look forward to bringing additional new features throughout the coming months!

Filed under: Products & Updates by Katie Lempicke
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We are pleased to announce that OptimalResume has been selected as a finalist in the 2013 About.com Job Search Readers’ Choice Awards for Best Resume Website!  OptimalResume is proud of the continuing recognition of our online career tools – recognition which would not be possible without the support of our wonderful customers.

Voting for the Readers’ Choice Awards runs through March 19, 2013.  Show your support for OptimalResume by voting at http://jobsearch.about.com/b/2013/02/19/best-resume-site-2013.htm.  Finalists will be announced on March 27, 2013.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to providing job seekers with the best online career tools both now and in the future.

Filed under: News and Press by Optimal Resume
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OptimalResume provides a wealth of resume writing assistance, and one of the most useful tools in our Resume Builder is the Action Verbs tool.  The Action Verbs tool is like a resume thesaurus, containing verbs and suggestions to enhance your sentences and bullet points.  Although useful in all sections of the resume, customers have found this feature especially beneficial while working on an experience section.

Action Verbs can be used throughout the resume builder to enhance your statements to employers

In an experience section, it’s easy to state the obvious.  When revisiting past jobs and experiences, users tend to write about what they did, rather than the skills they developed.  Let’s take this frequently-seen bullet point from a retail store worker as an example: “Worked the cash register”.  While using the register is an important duty in a retail position, it’s hard to set your skills apart with this statement.  Employers would rather learn how working the register contributed to valuable career skills.

Action verbs can help turn this statement into something of more interest to an employer.  Here are some examples of action verbs being used to reword our original statement (action verbs are italicized):

• Coordinated customer purchases and transactions at checkout line
• Accurately recorded new sales, returns, and exchanges at cash register
• Expedited customer transactions through knowledgeable use of point-of-sale system

Notice how the suggested statements focus more on how the candidate completed this task and the skills they utilized to do so, such as coordination and reporting.  Most employers would find these statements more informative than the original statement, as they give a better idea of what the candidate can offer.

This is just one example of how action verbs can be used to develop more meaningful content for employers.  With our dozens of verb recommendations for inspiration, the possibilities are endless!  Some career centers even provide their own custom lists of action terms, including industry-specific terms.  Look for the Action Verbs button in the Resume Builder to get started!

Filed under: Did You Know?, For Job Seekers by Katie Lempicke
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Durham, N.C., January 7, 2013—ThinkOptimal, a leading provider of career solution tools, today announced that Southern New Hampshire University College of Online and Continuing Education, one of the nation’s most innovative and fastest growing universities with an enrollment of over 20,000 students in more than 180 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, has selected OptimalResume.com’s award-winning suite of career applications as the standard for their online career services program.

“We are known by the company we keep and we are delighted that Southern New Hampshire University College of Online and Continuing Education — nationally recognized for academic excellence and New England’s largest online degree provider — has selected OptimalResume.com to help their students better target professional opportunities and advance their careers.” said Mark McNasby, ThinkOptimal’s CEO.  “OptimalResume.com is today widely acknowledged as the industry’s premier provider of career tool solutions for institutions. Our rapid growth in the higher education segment serves as testimony to this fact.”

“We recently conducted a thorough review of various resume builder providers with a specific focus on ease of use, ease of deployment, and overall functionality. While a number of these firms proved themselves to be capable, we were particularly impressed with the breadth and depth of OptimalResume’s application suite,” said Carrie Weikel-Delaplane, Director of SNHU Career. “They offered us a flexible solution that meets all our current and future needs. We were especially impressed with their ability to uniquely brand the service for our students as well as with the responsiveness of their support staff.”

OptimalResume.com includes a resume builder, cover letter builder, e-folio builder and interactive interview module.  Southern New Hampshire University College of Online and Continuing Education will deploy the full suite of OptimalResume.com’s application tools to assist their students and alumni with securing internships, full-time employment, and admission into graduate and professional schools.

About ThinkOptimal

ThinkOptimal is nationally recognized as a leading provider of online career services.  Its flagship product, OptimalResume.com, delivers innovative tools to leading educational institutions to assist them in preparing their enrollees for career advancement.  Selected by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Tools for America’s Job Seeker Challenge, Optimalresume.com is installed at over 500 institutions and used by 1.5 million individuals.  Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, ThinkOptimal has quickly established itself as the leader in productivity applications for job seekers in the United States and Canada. For more information about MyOptimalCareer, contact Dave McNasby at  (877) 998-7654, or visit the company’s website at ThinkOptimal.com.

About Southern New Hampshire University

Southern New Hampshire University is a not-for-profit, regionally accredited university with an 80-year history of educating successful professionals. SNHU has a total enrollment of 21,000 students in more than 180 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, available online, at our main campus in Manchester, N.H., and at our regional centers in New Hampshire and Maine.

SNHU was the only university to make Fast Company’s 2012 list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, ranking 12th overall.

Filed under: News and Press by Optimal Resume
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Building on Success and Affirming its Primary Mission

Durham, N.C., December 26, 2012 — OptimalResume.com, a leading provider of career solution tools, today announced that the company would change its corporate name to ThinkOptimal to reflect its expanding product line. “We are extremely proud of the success that we have earned in serving the needs of career service offices at over 500 higher education institutions. And we remain fully committed to continuing to meet the evolving needs of those institutions” noted Mark McNasby, ThinkOptimal’s CEO. “But our product portfolio has grown from a single Resume Builder to a full suite of powerful career tools that complement all phases of the job search process. We believe that our corporate name should reflect the breadth and depth of these award-winning offerings. In addition, we see new opportunities in adjacent markets to help job seekers of all ages realize career success. Our pipeline of product innovations continues to grow as we seek to strengthen our existing client relationships. 2013 promises to be a year of significant product advances. Now is the opportune time to make this name change as we position ourselves for continued growth.”

Although the firm will operate under the new name of ThinkOptimal, its flagship product, OptimalResume.com, will continue to be sold to institutions under its traditional brand name and existing OptimalResume.com co-branded websites will continue to operate without any changes. ThinkOptimal’s primary mission remains the support of career service professionals in their efforts to assist their enrollees with securing internships, full-time employment, and admission into graduate & professional schools. Career services offices face unprecedented challenges in today’s current environment, and in the months ahead ThinkOptimal will be delivering new features to OptimalResume.com to assist those professionals whose primary mission is the career success of their students.

Consistent with its mission to be the premier provider of career solutions, ThinkOptimal is also launching a new service targeted at individuals under the name MyOptimalCareer. Building on the success of the firm in the institutional marketplace, MyOptimalCareer offers the industry’s most comprehensive suite of tools to help individual job-seekers market themselves and manage all phases of the job-search process. MyOptimalCareer delivers in one package everything job seekers need including a Resume Builder with resume samples, a Cover Letter Builder with sample letters, an Interview Practice Module complete with interview tips and interview questions as well as advanced tools for building online work product portfolios and customized personal websites.

About ThinkOptimal

ThinkOptimal is nationally recognized as a leading provider of online career services. Its flagship product, OptimalResume.com, delivers innovative tools to leading educational institutions to assist them in preparing their enrollees for career advancement. Selected as a Top Career Tool in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Tools for America’ Job Seekers Challenge, OptimalResume.com is installed at over 500 institutions and used by 1.5 million individuals. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, ThinkOptimal has quickly established itself as the leader in productivity applications for job seekers in the United States and Canada.

Filed under: News and Press by Optimal Resume
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“So, what exactly do I say in a Video Resume?” Outside of technical support inquiries, this is the #1 question we receive on Video Resume.  This question is certainly not unfounded – Video Resumes are relatively new to job searches, and resources on recording a Video Resume are not as prevalent.  To help users compose a video introduction, we provide scripts and examples throughout Video Resume, specifically in a feature called the Script Builder.

When creating a new Video Resume, the Script Builder is found by selecting the “Use Teleprompter” option (oh yeah, and the teleprompter itself is quite useful, but that’s a topic for another blog post).  Users can learn the different situations which may benefit from a video resume, as well as topics to highlight when recording each type of video.  When writing the actual script, a familiar Examples button is available for section-by-section examples.

Example of the Script Builder in action

Some of the available script samples include:

• Broadcast videos (videos intended for a variety of employers)
• Industry videos (videos emphasizing your interest in a specific industry or career path)
• Employer videos (videos intended for a specific employer)
• College/graduate school admissions (videos to include in a college application)

Resources like the script builder are one of the many ways our programs can help job seekers stand out.  If your career center utilizes Video Resume, we encourage you to check out the script builder and it’s many examples!

Filed under: Did You Know?, For Job Seekers by Katie Lempicke
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Recently in our LinkedIn group, Optimal’s founder posted a list of actual interview comments made by job seekers which resulted in them not getting a call back from the recruiter.  We’ve taken a few of these quotes and dissected them further to discuss just why they’re not appropriate for a first interview:

• “What does your company do?” - Not knowing background on the company or position shows employers that you’re not prepared, or worse, not interested in the company.  You don’t have to know the company founder’s life story or favorite ice cream flavor, but a quick read of the company’s Wiki or information page will help immensely in an interview.
• “I am really not actively looking for another job but took this interview anyway” – If you were an employer and heard “I’m not really looking for another job right now” from a candidate, what would you think?  Probably that the candidate isn’t very interested and you should consider other candidates instead.  Even if you took the interview on a whim, conduct yourself as if you do need the position.  If you’re not fully invested in the process, it’s a misuse of both you and the employer’s time.
• “My long term goal is to start my own company and be self-employed” – This answer may have honest intentions, but employers prefer to invest in candidates who will stick around long-term.  If you don’t have long-term plans in this role, keep the answer open-ended, such as “I look forward to developing my skills at X Company over the coming years and seeing where my career takes me”.
• “I don’t have any questions for you now but if I think of something I’ll get back to you.” – Job interviews are a two-way process; an opportunity for employers to learn about you, and for you to learn about an employer.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve memorized the job description by heart, you must engage the employer with some questions to show your interest.  Good questions to ask include “Can you describe the company culture?”, “What is the experience like for a new hire?”, or “What’s the best part about your job?”

These are just a sampling of comments to avoid in a first-round interview.  If you have more quotes to add, feel free to do so on our LinkedIn discussion.  In general, when approaching an interview, try putting yourself in the employer’s shoes when forming your answers.  By understanding what the employer wants to see in a candidate, you’ll know which comments are appropriate to make in your face-to-face meeting.

Filed under: For Job Seekers by Katie Lempicke
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