Going to War with an Online Resume
 |
|
|
The reason is that in almost all online job sites, submitted resumes are converted to html or other programming languages friendly to search engines. When employers sift through resume banks on the internet the tools offered to them also work on the same search principles as that used by ordinary internet search engines. So, to be relevant in searches, keyword enhancement or optimization becomes essential for electronically submitted resumes. With resumes having dedicated web pages for them, additional tasks of Meta tagging and anchor text come in useful. However, in every case, the minimum that you can do to ensure that your online resume comes up in search results is to enhance it with keywords.
Now, the question is how to determine the set of keywords that you should optimize into your online resume. The best and most practical way is to search job advertisements for the position you are aspiring for and find industry-relevant words and phrases that seem to appear most often in the job advertisements. Make a list of such keywords and ensure that they are present at least twice within a hundred words of your online resume. You will stand a better chance of being found by recruiters.
On top of keyword density, that is the ratio of the number of keyword repetitions per hundred words, keyword positioning and bold lettering also helps in searches. If you find a keyword that is consistent in almost all the job advertisements for your position, then it is fruitful to find a way to include that keyword in bold within a heading or subheading of your online resume. Further the placement of keywords at the beginnings and ends of sentences as well as that of paragraphs have a marked positive effect on attracting search engines.
If you are creating an online resume for a certain company, it is also useful to browse through previous job advertisements of the same company and find out the keywords they are most prone to use. Including such keywords in a tailormade resume greatly enhances your visibility if resumes are electronically sorted. And the chances of that increases with increase in the number of submitted resumes for any job, as is the case under an economic recession.
Also keep in mind that novices have a tendency to overuse keywords and try to jam an online resume with needless repetition. Such strategies do not work in front of modern search algorithms and in fact increase the chances of rejection. A good keyword enhanced resume should slip in the keywords at proper places artfully, and no reader should be able to sense that the document is optimized with specific keywords. It is a common mistake to place keywords in a manner where they stand out as misplaced or inappropriate against the context or normal flow of words. Remember that it is important to ensure that your resume is found by search algorithms, but it is more important to ensure that the recruiter does not feel irritated or doubtful about your language skills upon reading your resume. So, optimizing a resume with keywords is actually a work of professionals, but you can also do it if you follow the advice in this article. With a welloptimized resume, you are ready to go for war and reach into a greater expanse of the market than possible with an online resume that is not optimized with relevant keywords. If you need an example, you can again read this article, it is optimized with the phrase ''online resume.''
