The New Word 2016 Resume Assistant

Since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn officially back in January 2017, I’ve been waiting for them to reveal more Office integrations using the LinkedIn network and data. So, this newest feature doesn’t come as a surprise to me at all–The Resume Assistant in Word 2016, available now to Office Insiders.

What Microsoft Says about the Resume Assistant

My Thoughts on the Resume Assistant

Located on the Review Tab, the Resume Assistant button will open a pane to the right of the screen that will allow all users to search LinkedIn for examples of how people describe their own work experiences. That means, this pane displays public LinkedIn profiles of real people, separated and stripped from their personal information, such as their names.

See it for yourself in this short video:

I have mixed feelings regarding the Resume Assistant at this time. I am glad that Microsoft has disabled “copying and pasting” directly from the Resume Assistant pane; however, I still fear that the temptation to type and “lift” information from this pane is still too great for some users.

When I imagine what the perfect “dream tool” titled “resume assistant” should or could be, ultimately, I feel this tool falls a tad short of that ultimate dream tool. This tool seems to help merely with keyword generation–which is but one small aspect of resume writing, useful in but one context (the uploading of the resume to a searchable database). Once a resume is successfully queried from a database, it’s what remains on it that will set someone apart from the crowd. Keywords only get your resume through that first stage. That second stage is far more important and far harder to master–that something that makes you uniquely you, and especially qualified for a specific job–that is what people have the most difficult time seeing in themselves and articulating succinctly on a resume. This tool does the opposite, and shows people how they can sound like every person and every job description. And that’s a problem.

 

Give Microsoft Your Feedback

I’ll be curious to see how this feature evolves based on customer feedback. This feature is still very much not “finished” (at least I hope) as it is still in the Office Insiders program. So, people, click the Smile icon at the top-right of your Word 2016 screen and send Microsoft your feedback about the Resume Assistant.

Send feedback to Microsoft