By Dennis Whitlock
You’re looking for a new job; you’ve put together an outstanding resume and now it’s time to post online. You’ve highlighted your career experience and educational background and you’re just certain that when this puppy goes up there’s going to be a digital lineup of employers offering you your next dream job. WRONG! The purpose of a resume is not to get you a job, rather, to get you an interview.
But here’s the rub; you may have overlooked the most crucial point of the entire exercise and you’re not even aware of it! This is seldom taught or even mentioned in most business courses. There is a huge chance that a human, initially, won’t even look at your resume!
In this time of economic downturn, most positions garner hundreds of applicants. That’s hundreds of resumes coming in for each open slot. If you think that all these resumes are being viewed by human beings you’re in for a real shock. Gone are the days when an assistant scours through stacks of resumes to find that perfect applicant for the boss to call in for an interview. In this day and age most resumes are scanned looking for target keywords. Your resume needs to be optimized so that it can be seen by these scanners. Without doing so, you will likely remain as invisible as if you hadn’t submitted in the first place.
Employers scan resumes to transfer them from a paper format to an electronic format for easy storage and review. Unfortunately, scanning software is not perfect and is easily confused. This means that you need to produce electronic versions of your resume and any “hard copies” that may be scanned in a recognizable form.
Digital resumes and paper resumes differ in three crucial ways.
1) Font/Typesets
2) Format
3) Keywords
Remember these rules when composing your resume.
Font/Typesets
Format
Keywords
Keywords are specific words or phrases that employers look for to identify the candidates they want to interview. Software programs that most companies use scan based on keywords – in much the same way you use keywords to search for information online.
If you don’t have the right keywords in your resume, employers won’t be able to find you. But how do you know which keywords to include? Here are three places to look:
Rick Gillis, in his book Really Useful Job Search Tactics provides 11 excellent ideas for identifying and embedding keywords in your Scanable Electronic Resume. I recommend reading this book and employing his tactics.
Well, that’s it, the most important thing that most people overlook. If you’re going to spend the effort to assemble a first-class resume, make sure that you don’t miss this crucial step.
Good luck on that next job!
Dennis Whitlock has been a business owner for nearly 20 years. In the process of offering employment to literally hundreds of individuals, he has witnessed, firsthand, the key elements of successful job searches. If the economy has you uncertain as to your career future, you may wish to consider a radically new and proven approach to finding a job (http://jobsearchadviceonline.com/).
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