8 Quick tips to getting your Resume Found

2007-07-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

About to embark on a career change? Want to position your resume to find you the dream job? Or maybe you just want a career change? The biggest part of the job hunt is creating your resume and posting it where you think you will get the audience you want. Most people don’t understand what sourcers and recruiters do to find your resume for the jobs they have.

Understanding how your resume is found, can dramatically increase your ability to get the position you’ve always wanted. After all, your can’t get an interview if no one who has a position can find you.

Here are some tips to help make the most of this tedious process from the perspective of a sourcer who is in the business of finding people.

1) Include the following words in the filename, title and/or keyword section of your resume: resume_cv_vitae. These are the most common words used to describe a resume around the globe. Many recruiters use one or more of these.

2) Include your area code, City, State and Zipcode at the very least. These are used to narrow down broad search results to local resumes only. In domestic and international locations, be sure to list your country, while you think it is obvious, doing so may increase your position in search results.

3) Include your contact information such as your phone and/or email address.

4) Post your resume on a web site that can be crawled (indexed/discovered) by a search engine. Monster, Dice, Hot Jobs and Career Builder are all databases that require recruiters to pay to be able to search their results. Search engines can’t crawl or discover every record inside a database, so listing your resume only in these services severly limits your exposure. Advertising on http://www.emurse.com your own website, or even a geocities page will drastically improve your discover ability. These places can be crawled by search engines and will return your page in a basic keyword search

An interesting side note is that http://www.emurse.com has some great tools for managing your resume. After you complete the information and content section of their resume wizard, you can reformat your entire resume with 1 click. You can save it in any format, PDF, TXT, DOC etc. You can email it directly from the site to anyone, and track when and why you sent it. It will even send you reminders to follow up with the person you sent your resume to. . Lastly the site can email you when anyone views your resume. This is handy information if you want to get discovered.

5) Make a skills section or Keywords section that lists many of the technology names that you have used. If you are a programmer this might be C, C++, Perl, Python etc. This will help get you discovered when recruiters source for you. Think about what describes what you are best at. How would people search for those skills and if you do a basic search for them what kind of results do you get? If you can’t find yourself, we can’t find you.

6) Your online resume can be infinitely long. Be sure not to drop anything from your online version. A single word is all it takes to be found.

7) Don't abbreviate or use non standard words: For example experience with MS Win 9x-xp will not get you as many hits as actually listing each on as Microsoft Windows 95,Windows 98 Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 2003, Windows XP. Remember that when someone is searching for you they want people with a specific skill. Don't let that skill be represented by a "-" or "*" or "x" on your resume.

8) Join http://www.Linkedin.com and post your experience. 12,000,000 other users are there. Including recruiters.

Okay, so there's my advise. Eight simple tricks to get your resume discovered.

Job/Career and Resume Search Advice

8 Quick tips to getting your Resume Found