Tips on making your CV searchable

Aside from hundreds of graduate jobs, the Guardian Jobs website is full of advice, tips, CV templates and informative articles that will get you honing your job hunting skills, thinking outside the box. Ultimately, these tips and information is actually likely to help you find a job.

According to one Guardian article, it’s not enough just placing your CV on an online jobs board and hoping employers will come to you. Business development manager Rowena Simpson actually argues on the Guardian Jobs site that you need to know how these online job sites function in order to make them work for you.

There are several things you need to bear in mind when creating your CV. Firstly, the recruiter will be time-short and will input just a few key phrases to find the right kind of candidate. If none of these key phrases come up in your CV you will not be shortlisted as a candidate. Furthermore, recruiters work with combinations of phrases and key words and if you don’t have both of the skills they are looking for, again, you will not get shortlisted.

The trick is to target the language of your CV to that used by recruiters in the sector you are hoping to work in. This takes some time, but is worth the effort in the end as you may just get a phone call on a Friday afternoon offering you an interview for your dream job.

The best way to find these key words, phrases and combinations unfortunately involves hard graft. You will need to read through dozens of job specifications in the industry you want to break into, looking for common language, words and phrases.

You need to know when to be detailed and when to be general and this is the hardest thing to master. This does mean you have to put a lot more work into not finding your own job but letting employers find you, which does seem ironic if not counterproductive, but it works. Think about Google for example. Have you ever types in a phrase and got say 10,000 results, only to tweak it slightly and get 20,000? These job sites work in exactly the same way. As always with recruitment, you need to tailor yourself, on paper or virtual paper at least, to the needs, wants and specifications of the recruiter.

Resources

Interview Help

Prospects Careers