Tim's Tips: Resume Keyword Relevancy

Here's the first in a series of job seeking tips from my buddy, Tim. He recruits in the Sales, Services and IT space, but his tips are relevant regardless of the functional space. He can also be pretty funny, but don't tell him I said that. Take it away, Tim:

OK! Here’s a tip….Relevancy. You are probably thinking yeah, yeah, write my resume so that my background paragraphs are “relevant” to the job description. I’ll give you a point or two for that, but I am talking about relevancy algorithms that are built/being built/being improved in systems all over the place. There are a number of companies that have developed cool relevancy engines as part of their software products. The big job boards are constantly updating their “ranking” features. The rankings/relevancy boil down to how often a particular term/phrase shows up in your resume. If you are a product manager and it says that 5 times on your resume, you will be ranked lower than someone who uses that term 30 times in theirs. Here’s the kicker…the new tools (and I just got approval to start playing with a cool new engine from EDM Logic!) not only look at the number of times your term or phrase shows up, but also looks at what OTHER terms and phrases show up in the resumes that have the highest number of instances of the term or the ones that are chosen as “best fits”. So for example if your resume has the term SharePoint 10 times and I, as a recruiter, pull a profile and decide it is a good fit (on paper), the relevancy tool will look at other terms in that resume, and then go out and pull other resumes that now have those sets of terms. Then, some tools will actually go deeper and suggest terms that show up in the profiles that you may not have known were even there, further refining your profile.

 

So, what does that mean? When you build your resume make sure to include terms that are associated with your core skills. So if you have SharePoint several times, make sure you use terms like Enterprise Search; Collaboration; BI; Portal; InfoPath; Forms Services; Excel Services…..etc. Because the day is coming when the engines recruiters use will be pulling resumes not just based on a few Boolean search terms, but rather on profiles derived from terms known to fit a specific role. If you disagree, please feel free to ping Heather and leave me out of it!