A resume is used to show off your best qualities to an employer. It shows your skills, work experience, and accomplishments. With all that information, how do you emphasize your best features? You can tailor your resume and pick only your most impressive entries, but you can also use keywords that will help you stand out and impress your potential employers.
Keywords will do a few things: they will keep your resume focused, they will make certain traits stand out to employers, and they will make your resume different than your competition, making you stand out even more.
- Keeping your resume focused: Keywords will keep your resume focused because everything you list or say will go back to reinforce those keywords. This will make your resume coherent, consistent, and focused.
- Make certain traits stand out: Instead of your potential employers looking at many traits that are desirable, using keywords, especially those found in the job posting, will make specific traits stand out so that they know exactly what they can expect from you as far as skills and expertise go.
- Make you stand out among the competition: Not many people know to utilize keywords in their resume, so if you do, then your resume not only stand out, it will be picked up by scanning machines used by recruiters and employers to week out non-candidates.
So now that you know how keywords can improve your resume, you need to know how to utilize them.
- Pick out about three keywords you would like to use. A few good ones could be, Customer Service & Relations, Operations, Information Technology, Sales & Marketing, Staff Leadership, Finance, tc. The keywords can be anything that make you stand out and emphasize the things you are best at, but they should also relate directly to the skills/qualifications outlined in the job posting.
- Insert the keywords wherever appropriate into your resume. Keywords can be incorporated into your career summary, your skills (keyword) list, your professional experience, and accomplishments. Make sure that potential employers see these keywords and have a clear understanding of your areas of expertise.
Using the appropriate keywords throughout your resume will help to ensure that YOU will be the candidate called for the inteview.