All you need to know about LinkedIn powered Resume Assistant in Word

You must be aware that, Microsoft and the professional social-networking site LinkedIn launched the LinkedIn-powered "Resume Assistant" in Microsoft Word. This collaboration makes the task of writing resumes that project one's skills and expertise to be easily noticeable by hiring managers.

In this post, we will learn a little more about 'Resume Assistant' and how it will help you to get higher prospect of getting an offer.

There is absolutely no doubt regarding the importance and unavoidability of having a compelling resume for kickstarting one’s career. But preparing a quality resume that projects all the required skill sets for a job is not easy. Consider two fresh graduates having similar skill sets who applied for a lucrative job with a single vacancy. In this case, since their skills tally, the difference between the one who gets selected and the one who gets rejected can be as little as the difference in their resume. Yes, the more appealing one’s resume, the higher the prospect of getting an offer.

In this example, what if one of the leading technology companies and the leading business and employment-oriented, professional social-networking service providers came together to help you out to create a compelling resume? That is exactly what Microsoft and the professional social-networking site LinkedIn have done by launching the LinkedIn-powered Resume Assistant in Microsoft Word. This collaboration makes the task of writing appealing resumes that project one’s skills and expertise in a way to be easily noticeable by hiring managers.

This feature, which is available to Word 2016 and Office 365 subscribers, can be opened from the review tab of Microsoft Word. Once you locate the role that you are looking for and type it in the Resume Assistant, then you can choose to view relevant examples that show the work experience descriptions of successful professionals. For viewing more focused examples, you can choose to type in the industry name in the relevant field, which is optional. After carefully studying the examples, you can weave descriptions that better reflect your experience.

Apart from the work experience examples, Resume Assistant lists the top skills that are identified by LinkedIn as relevant to the role that is typed in. To get a better perspective about integrating specific skills into the description, you can filter the examples based on the skills. This feature helps you to entwine all relevant skills into the resume, even those that you may overlook at times, with greater visibility.

As a value-added service, Resume Assistant, using the LinkedIn Artificial Intelligence engine, displays open job opportunities that are related to the role and industry that you type in. As the user, if interested, you can click the relevant job link to start the process of applying for it. Though a LinkedIn account is not a prerequisite for using Resume Assistant, a valid account is required if you wish to apply for a job suggested by it.

Although the Resume Assistant is expected to serve the interest of many, especially people in the early stages of a career, a few have raised their eyebrows that the uniqueness of their Resume will be lost if everybody starts referring to it. To allay their fears, LinkedIn has provided an opt-out option in its privacy settings, so that users can decide whether or not the information they share on their LinkedIn public profile will be available to be shown to Resume Assistant users.

One not so prominent shortcoming is that the Resume Assistant is not available when either the display language of Word is set to anything other than English or the Windows region is not set to a few specified home locations.

Despite this, knowledgeable persons from the industry like Andre Akkari who worked for a software company before turning into poker professional and Barry Greenstein who earned a degree in computer science and Ph.D. in mathematics have hailed this as a great collaboration to help youngsters kick-start their career. In fact, irrespective of the career level, job seekers are expected to benefit from this.