Curriculum Vitae: Pay attention to keywords!

I take a cue from what I happened to read recently in an article in the Wall Street Journal, to tell how, “today”, the  keywords reported in the curriculum are needed more than “yesterday”, to determine the success of the candidacy. Whether it is evaluated by the human eye or by the machine.

Yes, the machine. Because to solve the (never solved) problem of tons of CVs that companies have to periodically process to cope with new selections – at least in large companies – software capable of reading and evaluate the presence and frequency of those words that are expected to be written in a resume aligned to the position.

In the article, a manager tells of his personal experience. After seeing his CV go unnoticed most of the time, he decides to seek advice from an HR expert. And it is thanks to his help that the manager “discovers” that her resume is “horrible” on several fronts.

In particular, the consultant reports the total absence of relevant keywords about the positions for which the manager tends to apply. As this story happened in the USA, the question words are, for example, “client capture”, “relationship management”, “process design”, “productivity improvement”; which for us could be “acquisition of new customers”, “relationship management”, “process definition”, “productivity increase”.

After the consultant’s intervention, phone calls from recruiters began to follow when sending the curriculum. Not that the success is due only to the new keywords – the variables are many – but there is no doubt that a resume must have them to outline a perfectly qualified candidate.

This story and the spread of software designed to scan mountains of curricula should make us turn on a light bulb in our head, and show us the way forward. Here’s what to do.

Refer to the source 

The job posting offers you verbs, nouns, and adjectives that you can make your own and use as an “echo”. If a company is looking for a “concrete” person, oriented to “organizational review” and with experience in “multi-line or multi-product” production contexts, and you have these characteristics, why don’t you think of communicating it using those same words that they have used in the ad? Incorporate these words into your resume and letter, making sure that the narrative is always fluid and natural.

But be careful

A sprinkling of keywords here and there on your resume might not get you very far. Because even assuming that there is software that evaluates their recurrence, for the application to be truly captivating, you must be able to accompany the keywords with that “substance” that appeals so much to the eye (and mind) human. And be concise: Candidates usually go too far in detail, affecting the readability of the resume and making it longer than necessary.