Results tagged “job posting” from Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters Tips Blog

“As an HR professional in corporate America (prior to my career-coaching days), I would often scan a resume in search of keywords alone,” said resume writer, certified career coach and job-search strategist Laura Labovich in the Q&A interview she did with Quintessential Careers. “I’d ask myself (in about 10 seconds or less): What job does the applicant want? Does his or her resume reflect skills and keywords of the job to which he or she is applying? Is there a header that is relevant, and does not include the old resume speak: “Seeking a job where I can utilize my communcation, interpersonal, and computer skills” (too much about the candidate; not enough about the company!)? Does the resume speak to what he or she can do for my company, not simply what he or she did for previous companies? Does it tell a story?

“In my HR days, attention-grabbing resumes were ones that:

• spelled out the job the applicant wanted in detail, leaving absolutely no unanswered questions for the recruiter;
• contained relevant keywords found by analyzing a job posting and sprinkling them throughout the resume (I distinctly remember a hiring manager counting the number of times an applicant listed java and c++ in his resume);
• and were error-free.

“In my private resume-writing and coaching practice, I now write resumes from the perspective of an HR manager; one who never did have the energy to fight to decipher the “fit” between a requisition and a candidate.”

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Inundated by resumes from job-seekers, employers have increasingly relied on digitizing resumes, placing those resumes in keyword-searchable databases, and using software to search those databases for specific keywords that relate to job vacancies. Most Fortune 1000 companies, in fact, and many smaller companies now use these technologies. In addition, many employers search the databases of third-party job-posting and resume-posting boards on the Internet. Based on figures from the early 2000s, it is safe to estimate that well over 80 percent of resumes are searched for job-specific keywords.

The bottom line is that if you apply for a job with a company that searches databases for keywords, and your resume doesn’t have the keywords the company seeks for the person who fills that job, you are pretty much dead in the water.

To some extent, job-seekers have no way of knowing what the words are that employers are looking for when they search resume databases. But job-seekers have information and a number of tools at their disposal that can help them make educated guesses as to which keywords the employer is looking for. See a detailed discussion of resume keywords and how to identify them in our article, Tapping the Power of Keywords to Enhance Your Resume’s Effectiveness and use our Keywords Worksheet to help identify keywords for use in your resume.

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In her article for Quint Careers, Are You Up To Snuff When It Comes To Soft Skills?, Peggy Klaus tells this story: One hiring manager — who echoed the sentiments of many others — says she can spot what she calls a soft-skills impostor in seconds. “In our executive-level job postings, we purposely ask candidates to explain how their experience will translate into helping grow our organization. You would not believe the number of responses we get from very senior executives who fail to address our question, much less even mention the name of our organization in their letter!” Translation: The job candidate is taking the “throw spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks” approach by using one-size-fits-all- communication. As for those applicants who don’t follow the instructions in her postings, “If they ignore me, I ignore them.” The hiring manager also noted, “Would you want this person leading your organization and presenting to clients? Communicating, listening, critical thinking — even at the most basic level — these are all very important soft skills.” A loud message is sent when an applicant fails to highlight details most relevant to the position, follow simple directions, or show signs of having bothered to visit the company’s website.

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Each cover letter you send out should be a little different according to the intended recipient and strategy. Cover letters should be customized according to each of the four basic job-search strategies:

1. Responding to job postings.
2. Resume distribution to employers of your target market.
3. Contacting recruiters or headhunters.
4. Networking among your professional contacts.

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A particularly effective way to deploy the specifics of a want ad or Internet job posting to your advantage is to use a two-column cover-letter format in which you quote in the left-hand column specific qualifications that come right from the employer’s want ad and in the right-hand column, your attributes that meet those qualifications. The two-column format is extremely effective when you possess all the qualifications for a job, but it can even sell you when you are lacking one or more qualification. The format so clearly demonstrates that you are qualified in so many areas that the employer may overlook the areas in which you lack the exact qualifications. See a sample letter in a two-column format.

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