FG Needing Help With Rirekisho (resume)

[IkemenTommy]

Hello all.
I need an immediate crash-course lecture on making a rirekisho (Japanese resume) and the shokumu keirekisho (employment history). I searched the FG forum and found Charles's Resume Kit which I found it very helpful. I understand what these two are but I have a few questions, such as whether you have to hand-write them or if it is acceptable to just type it. Writing it out is not a problem, except it is not really efficient when I have to mass produce them. If any of you FGs have made them in the past, can you please help me out on this?

I am seriously considering switching jobs soon but I also want to stay in Japan. I want to try to have this done by Saturday for there is a job fair, though I highly doubt there are jobs for gaijins unless you are highly skilled. I am fine with PM. Any help is appreciated.

[Taro Toporific]

Writing it out is not a problem, except it is not really efficient when I have to mass produce them. If any of you FGs have made them in the past, can you please help me out on this?

At Hitachi and Mitsubishi, I've reviewed submitted resumes of which 60% were computer printed on the "standard form" like Charles' resume kit which you can buy at any stationary store. Well done handwritten resumes received more attention but computer printed ones were not thrown out or ignored.

The important part of a Japanese resume is to use the "standard form" and never NEVER try to be inventive or creative. Be boring, chronological and NEVER follow the resume advice of What-Color-Is-Your-Parachute for Japanese companies in Japan.

[dimwit]

And make sure that you never smile in the obligatory photo. Remember a stony face is a dependable face.

[homesweethome]

And remember the resume is just something that gets passed around later at meetings and is useful for information about contacting you, so make sure it has your keitai number and email address on it. The rest should be like a label on generic brand toothpaste.

[IkemenTommy]

Do you really need a mug shot photo or can you just paste a jpeg of one and print it out?

[homesweethome]

Ikemen san,

You are not understanding properly therefore I will pass along to you the bible of rirekisho photos.


For use in applying for all Eikaiwa related positions


For applying to all technical related positions



For all else.
These you may borrow and I guarantee they will not fail.

[dimwit]

Ikemen san,

You are not understanding properly therefore I will pass along to you the bible of rirekisho photos.


For use in applying for all Eikaiwa related positions

Smiling WAYYY to much.

My suggestion - learn from a pro:

[IkemenTommy]

[Taro Toporific]

Taro, what's the rule with choosing the correct print paper? Are the white coated papers considered taboo?

At Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Fujitsu, the rule I was told to follow in grading resumes was to "demerit" resumes that were on off-white paper. Super-coated papers were disliked because they might slip and jam in scanners. No resume is "thrown away" ---all are kept for one year and some smart companies scan, OCR, and file them in a relational database by keywords.

[Charles]

Try to handwrite it, and write your kanji/kana as clearly and as well as you can. It is said that a person with good handwriting is assumed to be a person of good character. Well, at least my calligraphy teachers said so..

Be sure to stick as closely to the format as possible. Do not deviate from the standard in any way. Print on the right size paper, I think the forms in my resume kit are formatted for US Letter size paper, but the papers were scanned from the regular size and should print OK on the proper page size (A4 if I recall) so just tell your PDF reader to crop and not to rescale the image to fit the page.

Let me tell you how I did my resume from the forms in my kit. I printed a form, then laid a blank sheet over it, and carefully hand-wrote the info on the blank sheet, in the proper positions, like it was tracing paper. Of course I made a few errors but I just wrote a correction over in the margin. Then I scanned my handwritten sheet into the computer, and used Photoshop to overlay it on the form. That way, when I screwed up my calligraphy, I could fix it by just erasing, and pasting in my correction from the margin. Then I printed the whole thing out on my inkjet, with my photo included on the page.
Now I have pretty good calligraphy for a gaijin, which means my writing looks about like a 12 year old Japanese kid. But handwriting my resume (even if I submit a scanned copy of my handwriting) clearly indicates that I can write Japanese, which will get you past the first hurdle in blind job applications.

[Taro Toporific]

Now I have pretty good calligraphy for a gaijin, which means my writing looks about like a 12 year old Japanese kid. But handwriting my resume (even if I submit a scanned copy of my handwriting) clearly indicates that I can write Japanese, which will get you past the first hurdle in blind job applications.

That sounds like a smartest way to do it Charles. It's very important that the handwriting looks gaijin. I had a FG buddy hand in a handwritten resume that actually was done by his favorite hostess. The folks at the interview praised him for a full hour on his handwriting. He could not bear to tell them the truth it was done was an uneducated lesbian who only could write in block characters. He had to turn down the job.