iReconnoiter

With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, hardcopies of documents are digitised to facilitate efficient distribution and sharing of information amongst staff within an organisation, and even to office departments across the globe. In addition to advanced database management systems to accommodate large digital storage and also expedite information retrieval via complex search algorithms, little wonder that our job resumes or curriculum vitaes are not spared from being digitised to make life effortless and painless for the Human Resource Departments camp.

Most HR departments are using database systems to lookup for power words, keywords in their database of resumes. Keywords are important because I noticed that they are somewhat standardised for specific industries. For example, if I were an accountant, keywords would include – Cost Accounting, Budget Analysis, Auditing, Tax, so on … And those nifty keywords can be critical in the world of digital information and job searching. Employers and recruiters may take our resume and cover letter (especially if sent electronically) and do a computerised search for keywords or descriptors that match the profile they are seeking – think of it as a prescreening process.

Now, this scenario should tell us that we should craft our resumes to soak specific power words that best boost our skills, traits, abilities and accomplishments – so that those witty “search spiders” can effortlessly sniff out your crumbs and lure their crawl to your digital resume.

Just for a little fun, allow me to demonstrate power of search engine technology using my Mac’s Spotlight capable of locating files not by documents’ filename itself, but crawling into the contents of the documents as well.

Keyword : Cost Accounting
Say, a hiring manager is looking for an accountant with Cost Accounting skills, my resume is no where to be found in the search results, because I’m no accountant.

Keyword : Collaboration
Let’s try to look for some soft skills/people skills, somebody with collaboration skills

Keyword : Business IT
Specifying the Industry …

Keyword : Enterprise Integration
More industry specific keyword in the fields of Business IT

Of course, those HR departments would be using a more sophisticated databases to rummage through the piles of digital resumes but from my little hypothetical experiment, resumes that have more of the desired keywords rank higher, and will be selected first to be read by a human reviewer. Perhaps other factors that can affect search rankings include proximity to other keywords and how close to the top of the page keyword hits occur.

Therefore, in addition to placing keywords relevant to your field throughout your resume and cover letter, let us play the game by reinforcing our digtial resume with an extra paragraph of “keyword summary” near the top of our resume specifically for a resume search engine.

The more keywords we have, the greater the likelihood of ranking high in the search.