The same can be said when constructing a resume.

When searching for candidates online, ‘Rockstar’ and other overly and incorrectly descritive key words are never typed into a candidate search engine. Similarly, Words like ‘passionate’, ‘hard-working’, ‘leader’, ‘mentor’ and many others in this strain are not on top of any search keyword list.

With this in mind, writing a resume should be conducted with the job you are aiming for in mind. Think about how a recruiter would conduct a keyword search on you and make sure you have SEO optimised your resume.

Saw a good idea online, maybe it was here on ERE:
Marketing’s job is to turn ordinary crap into World-Class BS (like much of what we see here on ERE), so companies should give Marketing the basic information, and then have them write the JDs- They might be interesting, they should be in some form of English, and they might even have an element of fact in them, too.

Cheers,

Keith keithsrj@sbcglobal.net

On the flip side, I have seen titles that provide a different twist, or even simple additional information, get viewed more often than a “bland” job title. For example, one employer who was getting low response to an ad titled “Inside Sales” embellished it to “Inside Sales – Family-owned, great work/life balance!” After the change, they saw the views increase more than two fold.

The balancing act, it would seem, is to assure the title is search engine friendly while seeing to it that when a job seeker sees 10 nearly identical ads, yours is the most interesting and thus the first one to get clicked on.

Very relevant thank you!

All good points!

It is too bad that so few people who post jobs to Monster, Careerbuilder, or even a niche board like our CollegeRecruiter.com understand the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). If they did, the vast majority would likely take the extra minute or two to craft an SEO-friendly job title. More than anything else, that job title determines the success or failure the posting because your job can be the greatest in the world but if no one sees it, no one will apply to it.

The jobs which tend to underperform on our site are those which use internal jargon in the job title, such as SE2 instead of Software Engineer II. I doubt that very many software engineers are going to search Google, Bing, or a job board using the keyword “SE2″ but you can bet that they will search using the keyword phrase “software engineer.” It is likely that the SE2 job will come up in the search results as the recruiter likely included “software engineer” in the job description, job requirements, or education requirements fields but the search engines place much greater emphasis on page titles / job titles than they do on the paragraphs of information on those pages.