Imagine there was a way to encode your resume with magical words that would virtually ensure that employers would be interested in interviewing you. But the catch is that there’s a different set of magic words for every job, and you have no way of knowing what the words are.
Such is more or less the situation in job-hunting today, which increasingly revolves around the mysterious world of keywords. Employers’ use and eventual dependence on keywords to find the job candidates they want to interview has come about in recent years because of technology. Inundated by resumes from job-seekers, employers have increasingly relied on digitizing job-seeker resumes, placing those resumes in keyword-searchable databases, and using software to search those databases for specific keywords that relate to job vacancies. Most Fortune 1000 companies, in fact, and many smaller companies now use these technologies. In addition, many employers search the databases of third-party job-posting like Naukri.com or Monster.com and resume-posting boards on the Internet.
The bottom line is that if you apply for a job with a company that searches databases for keywords, and your resume doesn’t have the keywords the company seeks for the person who fills that job, you are pretty much dead in the water.
Now, we suggested that job-seekers have no way of knowing what the words are that employers are looking for when they search resume databases. That’s true to some extent. But job-seekers have information and a number of tools at their disposal that can help them make educated guesses as to which keywords the employer is looking for. This article and its sidebars describe some of those tools and tell you how and where to use the keywords you come up with on your resume and beyond.
So, how can we figure out what the magic words are? Click here to Post your Resume
First, we know that in the vast majority of cases, they are nouns. Job-seekers have long been taught to emphasize action verbs in their job-search correspondence, and that advice is still valid. But the “what” that you performed the action in relation to is now just as important. In the following examples, the underlined nouns are the keywords that relate to the action indicated by the verbs:
Ø Conducted cross-functional management for initial and follow-up contact.
Ø Coordinated marketing campaigns and special events.
Ø Managed customer database, product updates, and upgrades.
Ø Functioned in project-management role.
ØOversaw procurement, allocation, distribution control, stock levels, and cost compilation/analysis.
And what kind of nouns are sought? Those that relate to the skills and experience the employer is looking for in a candidate. More specifically, keywords can be precise “hard” skills — job-specific/profession-specific/industry-specific skills, technological terms and descriptions of technical expertise (including hardware and software in which you are proficient), job titles, certifications, names of products and services, industry buzzwords and jargon, types of degrees, names of colleges, company names, terms that tend to impress, such as “Fortune 500,” and even area codes, for narrowing down searches geographically. Awards you’ve won and names of professional organizations to which you belong can even be used as keywords.
The prevailing wisdom for several years was that you should front-load your resume with a laundry list of keywords — a keyword summary with no context — because supposedly database search software would search no more than the first 100 words of your document. If that 100-word limitation was ever true, it doesn’t seem to be anymore, and job-seekers are now advised to use keywords throughout the resume.
It still makes some sense to front-load the resume with keywords, however, partly to ensure you get as much as possible into the document, and partly for the phase of resume review in which humans will screen your resume (after the initial screening by the search software) and may be attracted to keywords that appear early in the document.
But while some career experts still advise a bare-bones spewing of keywords labeled “Keyword Summary,” a more accepted approach is to sprinkle keywords liberally throughout a section early in the resume labeled “Summary of Qualifications,” “Professional Profile,” or simply “Profile.” Instead of a mere list of words, the summary or profile section presents keywords in context, more fully describing the activities and accomplishments in which the keywords surfaced in your work. This contextual collection of keywords that describes your professional self, in a nutshell, will certainly hold the interest of human readers better than a list of words will. Ideally, keywords are tied to accomplishments rather than job duties, so a good way to make the leap from keyword to a nice, contextual bullet point to include in a profile section is to take each keyword you’ve identified as critical to the job and list an accomplishment that tells how you’ve used the skill represented by that keyword. For example:
Ø Solid team-building skills, demonstrated by assembling Starwood’s marketing team from the ground up to service Starwood International’s 7,700 hotels worldwide.
Ø Savvy in e-commerce marketing concepts, having participated in design of two company Web sites, and conducted a symposia series to instruct hotel executives in the value of Internet marketing.
Keywords should also appear in the rest of your resume beyond the profile or summary section. Most applicant-search software not only looks for keywords but also ranks them on a weighted basis according to the importance of the word to the job criteria, with some keywords considered mandatory and others that are merely desirable. The keywords can also be weighted and your resume ranked according to how many times mandatory words appear in your resume. If your document contains no mandatory keywords, the keyword search obviously will overlook your resume. Those with the greatest “keyword density” will be chosen for the next round of screening, this time by a human. Generally, the more specific a keyword is to a particular job or industry, the more heavily it will be weighted. Skills that apply to many jobs and industries tend to be less weighty.
Since you also don’t know the exact form of a keyword that the employer will use as a search criterion, it makes sense to also use synonyms, various forms of your keywords, and both the spelled-out and acronym versions of common terms. For example, use both “manager” and “management;” try both CRM and Customer Relationship Management.
And remember that humans can make certain assumptions that computers can’t. A commonly cited example is the concept of “cold-calling.” People who read the phrase “cold-calling” in your resume will know you were in sales. But unless “cold-calling” is a specific keyword the employer is seeking in the database search, search software seeking “sales” experience may not find your resume.
To determine the keyword health of your current resume, highlight all the words in it that, based on your research of ideal positions in your field, would probably be considered keywords. Electronic resume guru Rebecca Smith says a good goal to shoot for is 25-35 keywords, so if you have fewer than that currently, try to beef up every section of your resume with keywords, varying the forms of the words you choose.
Indeed, a Feb. 2002 study by the Career Masters Institute notes that resumes that aren’t focused on a job’s specific requirements aren’t competitive. Does that really mean you need to create a separate resume for every job you apply for? Yes and no. It’s probably not practical or realistic to totally revamp your resume for every opening. But you can tweak elements such as your objective statement and professional profile, thus adjusting some of your more important keywords for each job you apply to. Customizing your resume when completing online resume forms at job boards also makes sense.
Ideas for identifying Resume Keywords:
- Look for job descriptions in books and job-description websites.
- Visit the meetings and websites of professional associations in your field to look and listen for current buzzwords.
- If you are working with a recruiter or headhunter, that person can be an excellent source of keyword tips.
- Imagine you were writing an ad or job description for the type of job you seek; what keywords would you use?
- Research and incorporate into your keywords the company culture and the values of employers you are targeting. Note especially the company’s mission statement and look for ways to quote it in your resume and/or cover letter.
- Scrutinize news stories in trade magazines relevant to your work. Read cutting-edge magazines, such as Fast Company.
- Join online discussion groups and chat rooms that relate to your field and observe the words professionals are using in their discussions.
- Read annual reports from the companies you’d like to work for.
- Talk with employees working at companies you want to work for and listen for the jargon and buzzwords that your interviewees use in talking about the company and its jobs.
- Talk to human resources professionals.
- Use Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to search for job descriptions.
- Consult online dictionaries and encyclopedias.
- Visit online specialty sites defining acronyms and technical jargon.
More keyword tips and cautions:
v Columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy notes that some applicant software programs can’t index resumes in MS Word. But you have to have your resume indexed if you want its keywords to be searched. Thus, the importance of keywords supports the necessity of having both a print version of your resume and a text version that you can simply paste into an e-mail message. Some employers don’t want to take the extra step of opening the print version of your resume that you’ve sent as an e-mail attachment, and others won’t do so for fear of viruses.
v If you post your resume on Internet job boards, be sure to avoid emphasizing keywords that relate to jobs you don’t want. If you have jobs in your employment history that are unrelated to what you want to do next, go easy on loading the descriptions of those jobs with keywords. Otherwise, your resume will pop up in searches for your old career and not necessarily your new one.
v Don’t forget about “soft skills,” such as interpersonal and communications skills that relate to many types of jobs. These soft skills tend to be the ones that are transferable and applicable across various jobs/careers, as well as desirable personality traits. Below is a nice list of nouns and adjectives that represent a sort of “second tier” of keywords, the first tier being the hard skills that relate very specifically to the job you seek.
Here’s a list from which you can choose your pick.
ü Self-driven ü Team building ü Adaptable ü Ability to Implement ü Accurate ü Communication Skills ü Dependable ü Deadline driven ü Ethics ü Goal oriented ü Innovative ü Leadership ü Open Communication ü Problem Solving ü Results Oriented ü Self Accountable ü Supportive ü Takes Initiative ü Ability to Plan ü Ability to Train ü Assertive
| ü Conceptual Ability ü Detail-oriented ü Extensive Experience ü Industrious ü Motivated ü Open Minded ü Persuasive ü Resourcefulness ü Setting priorities ü Risk taking ü Self Managing ü Self-driven ü Industrious ü Motivated ü Open Minded ü Persuasive ü Resourcefulness ü Setting priorities ü Risk taking ü Self Managing ü Self-driven
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This article is a preview of a chapter from the book, Words to Get Hired By: The Jobseeker’s Quintessential Lexicon of Powerful Words and Phrases for Resumes and Cover Letters, the first e-book published by Quintessential Careers Press.
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