Your Resume: How to Research, Choose, and Write an Effective Keyword Block to Improve Your Resume’s Results
Resume keywords, and how to write them, is one of the simplest and most important steps in your resume development---whether you’re developing a sales resume, technical resume, or some other focus for your resume document.
Resume keywords are words and phrases that the person who writes a job description uses to describe the requirements for a particular position. Check out this sample job description:
“Office assistant needed for busy appliance repair business. Pleasant phone voice and excellent customer services skills required. Must be proficient in MS Office, including Word, Access, Excel, and PowerPoint.”
The words “Pleasant phone voice, excellent customer service skills, proficient, MS Office, Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint” in this description are especially important to include in your resume, because when a resume screener begins sorting through the many resumes he receives in response to an ad, he’s going to be looking for evidence that candidates have expertise in these areas. These words and phrases are examples of keywords that would be included in a resume.
Because the resume sorting process may happen either electronically (where a computer program sifts through a database of resumes to locate those with the greatest number of keyword matches), or visually (when a resume screener reads all of the submitted resumes in hopes of finding the skills he seeks), it’s important for you to include the right keywords in your resume. All of the keywords you decide to include in your resume can be combined into a section called the “keyword block”. For you, the resume writer, the keyword block is a “gimme”, because it’s easy to produce and highly effective.
1. Locate Job Descriptions Relevant to Your Position Target
The first step toward building your keyword block for your resume is simple and fun. Your goal is to locate a few detailed job descriptions that describe the kind of position you’re seeking. Here are some ideas for finding what you need:
If you have a detailed job description already, such as a job ad that you want to develop a resume for, you can count that as one of your three to four descriptions.
If you don’t already have a detailed description, log onto a job search site, such as www.monster.com, and hunt for job ads that describe the kind of work you’re aiming for. For example, when you log onto www.monster.com, the first thing the site asks you to do is to plug in the job title or keywords for the type of position you’re aiming for, and click “Search”. A long list of job ads will pop up. Hint: As you complete this step, don’t worry about selecting a particular geographic area. Your goal is to locate sample job descriptions, not actual job ads to respond to.
Another resource for resume keywords is a site like www.careerinfonet.org. This is a government site describing different career specialties. To locate potential keywords connected to your specialty, click the “Browse Occupations” link and follow the prompts.
As you locate position descriptions, copy the text and paste it into a word processing document that you create as you develop your resume. You’ll wind up with a long list of job requirements.
2. Condense Your Long Keyword List to a Concise Keyword Block
Now that you’ve collected all of this great keyword information, your next goal is to boil this long list of words into a concise keyword block. Follow this process to create an effective result:
Read through the text descriptions line by line, and delete words or phrases that don’t pertain to your background. CAUTION! As you begin deleting phrases, be sure to delete them only if you truly have no experience at all with that particular skill. This is not the time to be modest about your background! If you’ve ever experienced a particular skill area at all, even if it was a single project or class, it counts.
Delete any company-specific information, such as where it reads “CYNET is seeking an experienced Sr Technical Writer to begin working a project in Botbell, WA ASAP!”
Delete or combine any phrases that are very similar. For instance, “Work with developers and analysts to obtain additional information” and “Work with information provided by developers” say pretty much the same thing, so they can be combined into one statement, “work with developers and analysts to obtain necessary information.”
Now evaluate your keyword block. Ideally, you want to wind up with about 75 – 150 words. Is your keyword block still too long? Then continue with these steps:
Delete any phrases for aspects of the job that you consider to be of lesser importance. For instance, in my opinion, “work on projects across multiple locations” is assumed as something that most tech writers could do, so I cut it out.
Ask yourself again, “Can any of these requirements be combined, because they’re pretty similar?” Blend any phrases that can still be joined.
To reduce your keyword count further, consider including character descriptions, such as “quick learner” and “self starter” elsewhere in your resume, such as within work history descriptions.
If necessary, delete even more phrases that are of lesser importance, to reach your keyword-count goal.
This is what I came up with for the first cut at condensing my initial keyword block text for a technical resume targeting technical writing positions:
Work with engineers to update on-line help, user guides, and release notes; Work with developers, analysts, and product marketing to obtain needed information and create functional specifications; Knowledge of FrameMaker, Word, Photoshop; Technical report and proposal writing experience; Meet proposal deadlines by establishing priorities and target dates for information gathering, writing, review, and approval; Develop technical documentation by working within objectives, timetables, staffing, budget, and standards of performance; Maintain quality results by using templates; Presentation Skills, Written Communication, Graphic Design Skills, Technical Documentation, Layout Skills, Problem Solving, Deadline-Oriented, Process Improvement, Coordination, Strategic Planning, Market Knowledge.
Realize that you don’t need to get rid of keywords forever. Instead, create a separate document, labeled, “Master Keywords List”, to pull from in the future as you need to. As you create each resume, you can review your master keywords list and select only the keywords that pertain to a specific opportunity. Also, be kind to yourself regarding how you decide to include or delete information. There’s no single “right” way to complete this step. Do your best, realizing that you can go back and change things later if you need to. Resumes are a continual work in progress!
Excerpted and adapted from “Career Coward’s Guide to Resumes” by Katy Piotrowski, M.Ed.
