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Health & Fitness

Make Your Resume Keyword Rich and Scanner Friendly!

If you haven't looked for a job recently or even in just the past five years, there are new tactics that hiring professionals are using that you should be aware of before updating your resume.

Employers and recruiters increasingly rely on electronic resumes, resume posting boards and job banks to find job candidates. Resumes are either being scanned or input directly into keyword-searchable databases, and accessed when an employer inputs a keyword list of requirements that best describe the position they are seeking to fill.

An employer plugs in the most important key words they are seeking in a candidate, and the database searches for keywords describing job titles, responsibilities and descriptions, degree requirements computer knowledge, as well as personality traits. This software scans through thousands of resumes and identifies those that most closely match the imputed keywords. The more keywords or "hits" the software finds in a resume, the more likely it will be read by a HR professional. Keywords are the most important element of a scannable resume.

What exactly are keywords? Keywords are nouns or noun phrases that identify skills unique to a specific profession or industry. Although active verbs have long been essential for building a successful resume, now the noun or noun phrase that follows an active verb is equally important.

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Other sources for identifying keywords are job descriptions, job titles, software requirements, educational degrees, college names, company names, professional organizations, awards you've won and personality traits. Words that are repeatedly used in trade journals and classified ads in association with the job title you are seeking are also keywords.

Whatever your final word choices are, your keywords should accurately describe your skills, talents, and experience. As a word only needs to be used once for it to be considered a "hit" in a keyword search, use synonyms wherever possible to broaden your number of hits.

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The Summary area of your resume should consist of several short statements that highlight your most important qualities, achievements and abilities. By tailoring every word in the "Summary" to your targeted goal, you can make this area keyword rich.

It's important to list only the skills you would feel comfortable using if you were to be tested. Should the position you are seeking require knowledge of software you don't know, consider taking lessons before listing it on your resume. If you've submitted your resume online to sites like monster.com or careerbuilder.com your resume has already been electronically imputed into their databases. But what happens if when it's scanned from a paper copy?

OCR software (optical character recognition) attempts to match characters scanned from your resume with standard letter shapes. This makes it imperative that your resume is formatted with a font that OCR can recognize, font choice is the single most important factor in creating a scannable resume. Simple, conservative typefaces such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana and Courier are some of the best choices.

Your resume should be a quick and easy to read, containing no fluff and no unnecessary words. As hiring professionals look through hundreds or even thousands of job applications, they may spend only a few seconds reviewing each resume. To catch their attention, you must quickly convey that you standout from the competition. A successful resume is one that does not exclude you from consideration.

Your resume is a personal self-marketing tool; so make sure you get a powerful and accurate message across. By fine-tuning your keywords to meet the qualifications of each job, the more likely that you'll be asked to an interview where you can sell yourself.

Written by: Mary Carroll, with input by Stacie Renna

For more information on hiring Stacie’s professional resume writing services, you can visit her website at www.renna-executive-resumes.com or e-mail her directly at srenna73@gmail.com. 

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