Out of Work Bum

After I received the “world’s fastest rejection” that I wrote about in my previous post  I started thinking about the automated systems many companies  use  to go through the hundreds of resumes the receive.  As I thought about how these systems work (I am from the tech industry, after all) I began to equate them to the search engines we all use every day.  Now I know that search engines like Google and bing use very sophisticated algorithms to rank the information they get by crawling millions of web pages every day but it wasn’t always that way.   In the early days of search, the engines  simply looked for keywords in the text of the page and used them to determine what web page to display for a particular search. What does that have to do with your resume?  Well, let me explain.

Many of the automated HR systems that companies use have rudimentary search engine functions.  This function searches the resumes in the company’s database for particular keywords that relate to an open position.  The resumes with the best match are delivered to the HR or hiring manager. So, how do you make sure that your resume makes the cut?  Take a lesson from online marketeers by using some of the same optimization techniques.

There are hundreds of sites and blogs dedicated to SEO so I won’t go into it here but there are a few simple techniques  that can help.  First, read the job posting carefully and try to figure out what they are really looking for.  Most times you will be able to get an idea from the posting what keywords might fit the best.  Next, try to work those keywords into the resume  you submit for that particular job. I know this means customizing a resume for almost every job but your resume has to rise above the rest to even be seen by a person.  Don’t go overboard though. Remember that once your resume makes it through the automated system it will be reviewed by a real person.  It should make sense to the human reviewer as well.  Also, don’t get too fancy with the look and feel of your resume.  Remember the automated systems can only read the text and are easily confused by fancy formatting.  You can still have a attractive resume to hand out to people but the automated system won’t care what it looks like.

So, take a lesson from the search engines and create an optimized,  machine readable resume  for submissions to automated systems.