| |  |  |  |  |  | < Back to Career Resources Using Keywords on Your Resume to Land Your Next Job.With the rise and prominence of online jobs boards such as Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, etc., the shear volume of resumes that a company can receive for a particular job can be utterly overwhelming. Because of this,employers have turned to sophisticated resume tracking databases that receive the incoming resumes and filter them based on keyword matches. To give some perspective, Microsoft receives approximately 6,000 resumes each day (taken from Microsoft's jobs blog).
Obviously, having the correct keywords on your resume can make the difference between receiving an interview and having your resume lost in your desired employer's candidate database. So how can job seekers figure out which keywords employers are searching for?
To begin with, most key words are nouns that relate to the skills and experience the employer is looking for in a candidate. Keywords can be job, profession or industry specific skills, specific terms or descriptions of technical expertise,job titles, certifications, names of products and services, industry buzzwords and jargon, degrees attained, names of colleges, company names, and area codes, which are used to narrow searches geographically.
Begin your keyword search by reviewing job ads that are of interest to you. Look for skills, titles, degrees and words that would be particular to that job. It might be obvious, but if you want a position in pharmaceutical sales or medical sales put that in the objective. If you want to work at a specific company, such as Microsoft, and you sold to one of their competitors put that on your resume. You can be pretty sure that they would use their competitors as one of their keywords.
Once you have an idea what keywords you want to use there are a number of ways to insert them into your resume. A simple way is to create a section called "Keywords" or "Keyword Summary" and list your keywords directly after that. Put this section at the very bottom of your resume. A more appropriate and additional way to introduce keywords is to place them throughout your resume where appropriate. For example, "Closed $1.2m deal with Microsoft." Microsoft is the keyword in that sentence. We don't suggest building a different resume for every single job applied for but we would suggest that in the case of companies that you would do anything for to join.
Once the applicant-search software finds a keyword, it ranks them according to the importance of the word to the job. Some keywords might be required and others might be considered desirable. Typically, the keywords on your resume are weighted by how many times they appear on your resume. You want to have more of the keywords that they look for and multiple occurrences for each individual keyword. Shoot for 25-35 keywords and make sure that those words that you consider most important for your resume appear a few times. When posting your resume on Internet job boards, avoid keywords that relate to sales jobs that don't interest you. If you have had enough of cold-calling don't list that skill ten times. Instead, pull out your account management experience in your resume.
Good luck tweaking your resume and we hope that it helps you land the sales job of your dreams.
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