Best Blog and Keyword Stuffing

December 12, 2006 · Filed Under Current Events, Finding Your Job 

For those who may be interested, this blog has been nominated for “Recruiting.com Best Blog” award. If you like this blog, take a minute and please vote for it. Also, please feel free to vote for some of the other fantastic blogs on there. While I don’t expect to win (after all, those pesky recruiters would hate to see a generalist win), I think it is good to recognize the top blogs in our industry.

Jim Stroud posts on CollegeRecruiter about how to be slick about adding keywords to your resume.

I don’t know about other recruiters but I think keywords are awful. Whenever I see them, they seem… oh how to put it… tacky? And while Jimmy’s idea is pretty slick, if your recruiter doesn’t have an application tracking system (ATS) that parses the resume with the included summary, you are out of luck. I would guess that would be a good guess if the company has less than a 1,000 people and would almost be a sure thing with less than 500 people. So that can help you get a job at the big companies but there are better ways to do keywords that will help you get a job period.

I know it is a radical idea but how about including some of those keywords in the actual content of your resume. If it isn’t important enough to be even be mentioned, it is unlikely adding the keyword is going to help that. If you have sales experience but you don’t mention sales in your resume, what makes you think that adding “sales” to your keywords is going to help you land the job.

Sure, adding keywords is easy and too few people do it… now. But if something is easy and effective, guess how long that will help you? It seems much more worth the effort to spend it on making your resume produce results, no matter what computer (or what human) is looking at it.

Check out HRM Today for the latest in the HR blogosphere.

Comments

2 Responses to “Best Blog and Keyword Stuffing”

  1. Matt Kerr on December 13th, 2006 11:37 am

    I agree with your comments.

    If one is confident that the resume already has the effective key words integrated, adding keywords to the content might help from a keyword ranking perspective with a larger firms ATS thereby pushing the resume to the top of those that meet the basic specs.

    Remember, leave no tone unsturned.

    :-)

    Matt Kerr

  2. Ricadattwat on October 4th, 2007 7:57 pm

    I’ve got an Amazon gift certificate burning holes in my pocket,
    and I want to get the most bang for my buck.

    Enter the Secret Amazon Web Pages:

    http://tinyurl.com/38sojf

    This is where you’re going to find the “latest sales, rebates, and limited-time offers” from
    Amazon, and you can score some pretty deep discounts if you’re a savvy shopper.

    Next, there’s the special Sale link. This is open every Friday, and ONLY on Fridays.

    You can find the same good discounts here as you would in hidden Deals, although some
    Fridays you can really get lucky and make off like an Amazon bandit - I’ve seen discounts
    there as low as 75% off sticker price.

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