Your resume will be read by a machine, perhaps before human eyes ever gaze upon it.
Resume keyword search
Sounds Orwellian, and little frightening. Does it mean you need to write your resume differently?
Absolutely, said Irene Marshall, a certified professional resume writer.
In a story we wrote last week for TheLadders, “The Perfect Resume: Easy to Read and Easy to Search,” Marshall explained that your resume needs to constructed in a way that works for the humans (hiring managers, human resources associates and others) who will scour your credentials as well as the search engines and databases that will get it to their desk.
“All the old rules of grammar, brevity and clarity still apply, but with a twist – the document needs to be found by a search engine crawling a database of submitted resumes or the Web, Marshall said.
What is the search engine looking for? Keywords, Marshall said. Your resume
should include all the hot keywords that describe the industries in which you’ve
worked, your skills, and more importantly, the skills and jobs associated with the
positions you are looking for, she said. For example, if a recruiter is trying to fill a
position for “internal auditor,” they will likely search the database of resumes for
“assessment,” “compliance” and “regulatory environment.” The result: only
resumes that contain those words will make it to their desk.
After all, it’s Google’s world and we’re all just living in it. Your resume must as well.
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