Liz and Hiring Managers – I have a question about human-voiced resumes and how they work with key word searches or are key word searches that once were performed by hiring managers now passé? It seems to me one of the reasons we ended up with “boilerplate” terms in resumes was to match up with key word searches. And I’m a total fan of human-voiced resumes! Thank you, Liz, for the revitalization. Appreciate your feedback. Thanks. Dianne
Great question Dianne -- when we're in functions and industries where
technical or function-specific terms are involved, we've got to get
those terms on our resumes somehow. Organizations that use keyword
searching need to be able to find them. If we want to, we can get
more generic words like "communication" and "teams" into our resumes
without resorting to the hackneyed "excellent communication skills"
and "effective team player" malarkey.
We could create a list of 20 or 30 words we want make sure appear in
our resumes - and get them in there - without using them in their
conventional, dry-as-dust or kill-me-if-I-have-to-read-this-phrase-
again settings.
Let's take the infamous "out of the box thinker." You don't want to
work for a company that would load the phrase "out of the box
thinker" into its keyword search algorithm, and I'm not even being
flippant. No sane HR person would do that. There are far better ways
to use our precious resume real estate to illustrate (not to assert!)
our success in breakthrough thinking than to parrot that idiotic
phrase for the forty-millionth-time.
By keeping the words we believe we need but changing their
arrangement, we can have our human-voiced-resume/keyword-searchable
cake and eat it, too. Carrot cake for me, please!
Cheers - Liz
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