Fast Company: Keywords, social resumes, applicant tracking systems, and LinkedIn are all relatively new additions to the vocabulary associated with job searching. These systems affect the way your resume is read, interpreted, and shared. For employers looking to hire, these systems make it easier to find the right candidates. The successful job seeker must know how these work to be discovered by employers.
4 comments:
I would worry about creating two versions on my resume- one for computers and one for humans. The resume you create for a computer database would certainly look much different than one created for a human employer looking at a piece of paper. I wonder if creating the two resumes will end up making you appear differently to the two audiences. What happens when your computer resume and your paper resume make you look like two different people? You also lose all creativity and originality when creating a resume purely for a computer database. Seeing the key word "original thinker," and "creative" looses a lot of credit when your resume looks just like everyone else's in cyber space. I think it's a shame that the world of hiring has turned into something so impersonal. Employers may never know that the best person for a job is waiting out there if all they are able to see is a sub-par resume designed for a database.
I wanted to remark on the prevalence of LinkedIn as the standardized social resume - while I would rather hand someone a formatted, designed resume that gives information in the layout and organization, the formulaic nature of LinkedIn and all the various options to flesh out your job experience with documents, videos, endorsements and recommendations, etc. really makes it not so horrible for communication of these soft style choices to an employer. I outfitted my resume on LinkedIn with a slideshow of production photos - this type of thing is easy to do in the system with a plug-in. For an employer giving you a little time, these things too could help your keyword score and can give your employer more information.
Although I don't think most theatrical employers use resume database employment systems, there's still a chance our resumes could end up in them, so it's a good idea to consider the suggestions in this article. I'm not sure how good it actually would look to have a big block of keywords in my resume. If it's styled right, then maybe I'd be okay with this. The article did inspire me to maybe provide some reference to social media on my human-readable (currently only) resume.
It is interesting that you should build a resume that just bots scan and does not look nice and it is just a lot of text with the most key words as possible. I wonder how long it would take to make one of these type of documents since I know for me it takes most of the time in making a resume look nice and personable. I total think that a nice looking resume should come before this type of document. Also the fact that you should have a list of key words that you list on your nice resume so if a bot does get it you may get a few hits. I may be making a resume of this type in the next few months.
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