Microsoft is always going on about the benefits of subscribing to its services, like Office 365, and one of the big ones is that subscribers always get the most up-to-date version of their software and new features the second they’re released.
One of the latest new features added to Office 365 is something Microsoft calls the “Resumé Assistant”, or “CV Assistant” if you’re here in South Africa.
Simply click the CV Assistant in Word’s Ribbon (it’s under the Review tab), click Get Started, tell Word which position and industry you’re in, and it automatically pulls up samples of how someone in a similar position added that information to their CV.
It lists the top skills listed for people in your position which you can use for inspiration (or as a reminder in case you’d forgotten to add one) as well and pulls up a list of articles on CV-writing that could potentially help you wrap your head around putting your own together.
The addition even presents a list of jobs that you could potentially apply for, based on the information you enter. Lastly, it even offers a link to a page on LinkedIn that’ll let you tell recruiters you’re in the market for a job.
So if you’re looking for a new job but you aren’t sure about how to update your CV to reflect your latest work experience, Microsoft and Office 365 have you covered.
How to activate the feature
In doing some research for this piece, I discovered that initially, CV Assistant wasn’t active on my copy of Word. The icon was there, but it was greyed out, so I had to find a way to activate it.
Fortunately, the fix turned out to be very simple:
- In Word, click File, then Options.
- Under the General tab, navigate to the LinkedIn Features section.
- Make sure there’s a tick in the option that says “Show LinkedIn features in my Office applications”.
And voila, the icon becomes active. Easy!
