Tips From Tundra – Optimize Your Resume For ‘The New Normal’

The landscape of employment for job-seekers has changed dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic in Alberta. As of May 2020, the Alberta Government reports an unemployment rate of 15.5%. Combine that with experienced employees furloughed from various sectors, new graduates and those seeking a new career direction may have a steeper hill to climb than before. We continue to discover what is the new normal for Alberta post-pandemic, we revisit the topic of how to put your best foot forward when optimizing your resume for your job hunt.

Tundra Technical Solutions is a global recruitment agency headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. Since 2004, Tundra has grown quickly, today operating offices across North America, Europe and Asia. They work with top global partners actively seeking the best talent in multiple sectors such as finance, insurance, healthcare, technology, retail, energy, utilities, construction, mining, telecommunications, transportation and government to name a few.

Ever considered utilizing the skills a recruitment agency may have to offer? It may be the right time considering the volume of applicants in the hundreds on certain job postings, as shown in the image below. We spoke with Christina Esposito, Marketing and Communications Lead and Internal Recruiter for Tundra Technical Solutions on ways to optimize your resume for recruiters in the new normal.

(Source: LinkedIn Job Search)

Should your resume be written chronologically or functionally?

The key difference here is whether or not your work experience should be written as a timeline of your previous positions or should it be laid out in the form of what experience you feel is best suited for the position you are applying for. From a recruiters perspective, Christina mentions:

“We like to see a reverse chronological order of previous work experience. We recommend placing all of your technical skills right at the top of your resume, and then go into your most recent experience.”

Should you tailor your resume for the specific job you are applying for?

Say you are actively applying to open positions, tailoring your resume can be a time consuming task if your objective is to apply to the first 10-20 open positions you find. To that point, applying to everything you see can be detrimental to your efforts when utilizing a recruiter. Keep in mind, there is a human processing your candidate profile, and their efforts are to find the best talent for their employers. Christina offers a recommendation that can mitigate time for both the job seeker and recruiter:

“ we absolutely want to see someone tailoring their resume that matches the job description. A good tip for someone who might not want to go through a whole overhaul, is to first make sure that the job you’re applying to is relevant to your experience, recruiters can see if you’re applying to the first jobs that pop up for example. It becomes clear they haven’t really looked into the position they’re applying for. So, a lot of care and detail should go into those applications if you want to have the greatest success. Ultimately you want to make sure that the job description lines up with your skills…”

What is the best resume format that can be read autonomously through recruitment software?

As mentioned above, some positions can receive hundreds of applications. If you haven’t been made aware by now, recruiters utilise software called an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or what is referred to as resume parsing, which allows the hundreds of resumes to be read and processed, thus creating a candidate profile highlighting the most relevant information to send to an employer. Say you spent endless hours on the most aesthetically pleasing resume to give that ‘wow’ factor, that may have been a solid practice in the past, but ATS systems have difficulty processing these resume formats, thus your candidate profiles could be lacking important information.

“I would recommend against a PDF format. The reason being is that Microsoft Word documents are the most legible and easiest to parse with. The way the ATS works is, someone sends in the application, the ATS picks those keywords from their resume and matches them to the actual job description. Inserting images or a lot of text can make it difficult for recruiters to look up your profile in the future.”

What should NOT be included on your resume?

Some of these you may already know, but let’s be clear, having a resume with only relevant information is your best chance of success. Working as a retail store manager I had received countless resumes from individuals seeking employment. During that time, I had encountered some of the most outrageous and creative resumes from all walks of life. By no means am I a recruitment specialist, but sticking to the basics was a winner for my new hires during that time. Christina offers the perspective of a recruiter for what not to put on your resume:

“Jumping right into things like objectives or hobbies is fine, but we would recommend against it because the longer you make your resume, you can decrease the chances of someone reading the full document. Best practice is to always keep your resume one to two pages with only relevant information. For industry veterans that have lengthy work history, you should only list the most recent and relevant experience.”

Should you include links to your social media?

Social media plays a significant role in the recruitment process for both agencies and hiring managers. LinkedIn has become a major part of what we call this ‘new normal’, with more than 20 million companies listed on the site and 14 million open jobs, it’s no surprise that over 75% of people who recently changed jobs used LinkedIn to inform their career decision. When it comes to social media, Christina offers her recommendations:

“90% of the time, recruiters are looking at your LinkedIn or Twitter. We want to make sure we get a holistic view of the applicant. 40% of our hires last year were candidates we sourced directly from LinkedIn. We have situations where we have candidates that look great on paper, but after we do some investigating. He/she doesn’t actually prove to be the person he/she was saying on paper. It’s a point of validation and puts a face to a name. My recommendation would be to keep your social media profiles clean, descriptive and showcase your accomplishments, especially if you have a public profile.”

This information should offer you some insight into how the employment landscape is changing and what best practices to implement for your job hunt. Who wouldn’t want to save time and effort on what can be an arduous task?

If you would like to learn more about Tundra Technical Solutions, speak to one of their experienced recruiters or to view their available positions in Alberta, check out their website here or message them on their Facebook below.

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Scott McGinn

www.scottmcginn.ca

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Canada is failing dismally at our climate goals. We’re also ruining our economy.

Published on November 20, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

Short-term climate pledges simply chase deadlines, not results

The annual meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is dedicated to implementing international action on climate change, is now underway in Brazil. Like other signatories to the Paris Agreement, Canada is required to provide a progress update on our pledge to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. After decades of massive government spending and heavy-handed regulations aimed at decarbonizing our economy, we’re far from achieving that goal. It’s time for Canada to move past arbitrary short-term goals and deadlines, and instead focus on more effective ways to support climate objectives.

Since signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, the federal government has introduced dozens of measures intended to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, including more than $150 billion in “green economy” spending, the national carbon tax, the arbitrary cap on emissions imposed exclusively on the oil and gas sector, stronger energy efficiency requirements for buildings and automobiles, electric vehicle mandates, and stricter methane regulations for the oil and gas industry.

Recent estimates show that achieving the federal government’s target will impose significant costs on Canadians, including 164,000 job losses and a reduction in economic output of 6.2 per cent by 2030 (compared to a scenario where we don’t have these measures in place). For Canadian workers, this means losing $6,700 (each, on average) annually by 2030.

Yet even with all these costly measures, Canada will only achieve 57 per cent of its goal for emissions reductions. Several studies have already confirmed that Canada, despite massive green spending and heavy-handed regulations to decarbonize the economy over the past decade, remains off track to meet its 2030 emission reduction target.

And even if Canada somehow met its costly and stringent emission reduction target, the impact on the Earth’s climate would be minimal. Canada accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions, and that share is projected to fall as developing countries consume increasing quantities of energy to support rising living standards. In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), emerging and developing economies are driving 80 per cent of the growth in global energy demand. Further, IEA projects that fossil fuels will remain foundational to the global energy mix for decades, especially in developing economies. This means that even if Canada were to aggressively pursue short-term emission reductions and all the economic costs it would imposes on Canadians, the overall climate results would be negligible.

Rather than focusing on arbitrary deadline-contingent pledges to reduce Canadian emissions, we should shift our focus to think about how we can lower global GHG emissions. A recent study showed that doubling Canada’s production of liquefied natural gas and exporting to Asia to displace an equivalent amount of coal could lower global GHG emissions by about 1.7 per cent or about 630 million tonnes of GHG emissions. For reference, that’s the equivalent to nearly 90 per cent of Canada’s annual GHG emissions. This type of approach reflects Canada’s existing strength as an energy producer and would address the fastest-growing sources of emissions, namely developing countries.

As the 2030 deadline grows closer, even top climate advocates are starting to emphasize a more pragmatic approach to climate action. In a recent memo, Bill Gates warned that unfounded climate pessimism “is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Even within the federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change, the tone is shifting. Despite the 2030 emissions goal having been a hallmark of Canadian climate policy in recent years, in a recent interview, Minister Julie Dabrusin declined to affirm that the 2030 targets remain feasible.

Instead of scrambling to satisfy short-term national emissions limits, governments in Canada should prioritize strategies that will reduce global emissions where they’re growing the fastest.

Annika Segelhorst

Junior Economist

Elmira Aliakbari

Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute

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Lawsuit Claims Google Secretly Used Gemini AI to Scan Private Gmail and Chat Data

Published on November 19, 2025

Todayville

By Ken Macon

Whether the claims are true or not, privacy in Google’s universe has long been less a right than a nostalgic illusion.

When Google flipped a digital switch in October 2025, few users noticed anything unusual.

Gmail loaded as usual, Chat messages zipped across screens, and Meet calls continued without interruption.

Yet, according to a new class action lawsuit, something significant had changed beneath the surface.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Plaintiffs claim that Google silently activated its artificial intelligence system, Gemini, across its communication platforms, turning private conversations into raw material for machine analysis.

The lawsuit, filed by Thomas Thele and Melo Porter, describes a scenario that reads like a breach of trust.

It accuses Google of enabling Gemini to “access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users’ private communications, including literally every email and attachment sent and received.”

The filing argues that the company’s conduct “violates its users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.”

Until early October, Gemini’s data processing was supposedly available only to those who opted in.

Then, the plaintiffs claim, Google “turned it on for everyone by default,” allowing the system to mine the contents of emails, attachments, and conversations across Gmail, Chat, and Meet.

The complaint points to a particular line in Google’s settings, “When you turn this setting on, you agree,” as misleading, since the feature “had already been switched on.”

This, according to the filing, represents a deliberate misdirection designed to create the illusion of consent where none existed.

There is a certain irony woven through the outrage. For all the noise about privacy, most users long ago accepted the quiet trade that powers Google’s empire.

They search, share, and store their digital lives inside Google’s ecosystem, knowing the company thrives on data.

The lawsuit may sound shocking, but for many, it simply exposes what has been implicit all along: if you live in Google’s world, privacy has already been priced into the convenience.

Thele warns that Gemini’s access could expose “financial information and records, employment information and records, religious affiliations and activities, political affiliations and activities, medical care and records, the identities of his family, friends, and other contacts, social habits and activities, eating habits, shopping habits, exercise habits, [and] the extent to which he is involved in the activities of his children.”

In other words, the system’s reach, if the allegations prove true, could extend into nearly every aspect of a user’s personal life.

The plaintiffs argue that Gemini’s analytical capabilities allow Google to “cross-reference and conduct unlimited analysis toward unmerited, improper, and monetizable insights” about users’ private relationships and behaviors.

The complaint brands the company’s actions as “deceptive and unethical,” claiming Google “surreptitiously turned on this AI tracking ‘feature’ without informing or obtaining the consent of Plaintiffs and Class Members.” Such conduct, it says, is “highly offensive” and “defies social norms.”

The case invokes a formidable set of statutes, including the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, the Stored Communications Act, and California’s constitutional right to privacy.

Google is yet to comment on the filing.