Today’s Tip: Highlights R Us – Make Your Resume Glow

When recruiters login to the job boards to look at resumes, they would be faced with an impossible task if they had to browse through all of the resumes in the database in order to find the perfect candidate with the right skill sets. So what is a recruiter to do? Enter their best friend, the keyword. On most job boards, the first (and sometimes only) field that they complete are the keywords. This eliminates everyone that doesn't match their query. So what happens next? The job board produces resumes (in order of best matched keyword criteria) and then highlights the keywords in a different color so that the recruiter doesn't have to read the entire resume, but instead only look for the keywords that are highlighted. Do you see where I am going with this? Let me explain. If you want to help the recruiter to be able to identify you as the ideal candidate for the role, then you need to read the job description thoroughly, network with people at that target company to gain intelligence, determine what keyords are most important for this role,  and modify your resume by highlighting (with a yellow background) those word(s) that a recruiter would most likely be the most concerned with for that particular job posting. This will get you noticed by even the worst recruiter. In reality, you are dummy-proofing your resume!