Now, what exactly do you mean by keywords?
by Angela Loëb
She asked me, “Now, what exactly do you mean by keywords?”
I had just told my client who relocated to Austin from a country on the other side of the globe to come up with some strong keywords for her LinkedIn profile – we were going to work together on her “Summary” and “Specialties” sections.
Well, how do you explain something that you have taken for granted so many years? When I was a recruiter, I used keywords to search candidate databases. I scanned for the matches between keywords on the job description and the resume both physically and electronically. Obviously, I still do this with individuals when reviewing their resumes, cover letters, bios and LinkedIn profiles as a career consultant.
I explained to my client that the keywords she needs are the words she wants recruiters (or anyone who’d be interested in connecting with her) to use to find her when they search LinkedIn for people with her type of background.
A good place to start when determining your keywords is to look at your core competencies. I like the way Robin Kessler, author of Competency-Based Interviews, describes competencies: “Put simply, competencies are the key characteristics that the most successful performers have that help them be so successful.”
However, to pull the keywords out of the competencies you need to know what combination of skills, knowledge and abilities help define excellence in your particular field. Let me repeat… in YOUR particular field, not in every field.
Your keywords are not necessarily those words or phrases that I like to call “soft skills.” You know what I mean by soft skills, don’t you? They’re soft because they’re fluffy descriptors such as team building, communicating well with others, problem solving, etc.
Don’t get me wrong. Soft skills are useful and shouldn’t be tossed aside. However, I would be remiss in my role as expert advisor if I didn’t warn you that soft skills tend to fail in two necessary areas:
1) Defining excellence in your particular field. After all, shouldn’t everyone who wants to play in the sandbox know how to communicate well, solve problems, be a team player, etc.?
2) Getting you noticed. To a recruiter, soft skills are usually like white noise (synthetic noise source used for sound masking) which get ignored as the eye scans for hard data… the exception being when soft skills are backed up with results.
Okay, so back to finding your keywords. The best sources for keywords are job descriptions and job postings.
I agree with the advice given by Kim Kachadoorian in her article, Resume Keywords: What you need to know for a job search, part 1: “Print off a copy of the job description. Read it, then go back and highlight each of the keywords for that job… Review those keywords you have just selected - make a decision on which set of keywords are the most important, and those that are important but secondary.”
Kachadoorian goes on to give an outstanding example of how you might match up the description to keyword phrasing on your resume:
Job Requirement:
• Collaborate with website manager, internal marketing teams, and business units to maintain and develop websites and business-to-business collateral materials (print and electronic).
What your resume might say:
• Assisted website manager to develop and maintain department website.
• Worked with internal cross-functional teams to co-create marketing collateral and electronic information for business-to-business and business-to-customer customers.
On LinkedIn, your specialties section provides an opportune place to list your key offerings – your key search words. If I want someone to find me when they type in the words “Career Development” then I should have this phrase somewhere on my profile (and I do… multiple times). By placing these key words in my specialties section, they become highly visible to the visual scan as well.
The keyword section on a resume acts in the same way. You can give your keyword section a special title like Key Skills, Key Strengths or Core Competencies if you’d like. But create a list of keywords that stands out.
Some of the most common ways I’ve seen it done:
- Putting them in a special text box
- Setting them off with bullets, checkmarks or tildes
- Putting them under a headliner or under the summary
- Making a table out of them (my favorite)
By the way, we cover this topic in the READY module of The Job Search Boot Camp and provide standard examples in the accompanying workbook.
The bottom line is this. You want your ability to stand out, you want to be seen as a match and you want to be found, so keywords are absolutely necessary. Don’t skimp on this feature of your resume, bio or profile. Do the analysis – it’ll be well worth it.
