Best 6 Steps to Find Keywords for Your Résumé

  • 1 min read
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More than eighty percent of all submitted résumés (and 100 percent of résumés sent to Fortune 1000 companies) get scanned by software commonly known as an applicant-tracking system (ATS), and such scanned résumés are stored on a server in a digitized format. Humans are seeing only about one quarter of them and only if it resurfaces based on a query. That’s why most job applicants don’t receive responses from companies after submitting résumés. They are simply not seen by a human. Therefore, in order to increase your résumé’s chances of being at least viewed by a human–even if it’s not thereafter considered suitable–you have to understand the process and beat them at their own game.

Human resources departments that use ATSs base their queries on keywords they lift from job descriptions or receive verbally from hiring managers. Based on that information, the ATS extracts appropriate résumés from the ones on file. The human resources employee’s query may result in just a few résumés or a vast number. The ATS also scores those résumés and sorts and prioritizes them. Then the employee reviews, say, 20 and submits 5 to be interviewed.

Your job is to ensure that you embed sufficient, appropriate and relevant keywords in your résumé. So, what’s the best way to find those magical keywords? It’s a simple, albeit somewhat tedious, exercise.

  1. Search the Internet via job boards such as Monster and The Ladders.com to find 5 to 10 job descriptions of jobs advertised in the field you’re interested in.
  2. Cut and paste all of the descriptions one after another into a new MS Word document.
  3. Review the document, resetting in boldface what you consider the keywords throughout.
  4. Delete everything except the boldface words.
  5. Alphabetize the words, and delete duplicates.
  6. Copy your résumé into a new MS Word document, and repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 on that copy.

The two resulting lists will display which keywords from the descriptions are missing from your résumé. And now comes the creative part: you incorporate the missing keywords into your résumé so it seems seamless and a perfect match for the context in which the words are mentioned in the job descriptions.  You can speed up this process by using Jobscan.

By doing this admittedly laborious task, you increase manyfold your chances of being picked out from the crowd.  And now cross your fingers and pay close attention to the phone and your inbox.  Your invitation for further exploring your candidacy is on its way.  Good luck!

Picture of Alex Freund

Alex Freund

Alex Freund is a career and interviewing coach known as the “landing expert” for publishing his 80 page list of job-search networking groups. He is prominent in a number of job-search networking groups; makes frequent public presentations, he does workshops on resumes and LinkedIn, teaches a career development seminar and publishes his blog focused on job seekers. Alex worked at Fortune 100 companies headquarters managing many and large departments. He has extensive experience at interviewing people for jobs and is considered an expert in preparing people for interviews. Alex  is a Cornell University grad, lived on three continents and speaks five languages.

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