We tend to receive a lot of questions regarding keywords in resumes and how companies (that have these systems) use them to screen candidates. Be the first to read this article.

Previous to the technology that is being used and within the last decade, the recruitment process was more hands-on. There are still a lot of companies that do review resumes the old fashion way, but there are a number of companies that use software to scan a resume and pick out those words and phrases that closely match their criteria.

Applicant Tracking Systems work by reading resumes, and looking for keywords, and phrases. Depending on how these words are entered into the system, this will determine the likelihood that a particular resume will be selected for further review. The problem with this system is the person entering the information will dictate this and if they enter the least preferred information, then this could skew the candidate selection process. In other words, if they input the wrong keywords, then they will get a poor selection of candidates.

We believe that a successful resume should have a good percentage of job description requirements built into the document. We also believe there should also be some additional points that are related to the industry as a whole and those points should be present in the resume and cover letter.

Summary

We noticed that clients who use a combination of words from the job description, and from industry-related terminology tend to have excellent results. We recommend using the job description as the principle document to build the resume and supplement the information accordingly.

We hope you learned something from our article. Please share this on the links below and be sure to ‘like’ our Facebook page. Happy job hunting.