In this Project Management Recruitment Ideas, I’m going to cover this keyword issue that always pops up in a CV. We know that people read CVs in a certain way – there’s even a phrase coined “the sixty second rule” which basically means you have sixty seconds for your CV to make an impact when it is first opened by someone. To be honest, sixty seconds seems like quite a long time when there are hundreds of CVs to look at and you’re on a tight deadline. One of the things that happens when you open a CV is a quick scan of the document – you’re trying to get a feel for the whether or not this person just feels right for the role based on the scattering of keywords throughout the document. You may not like, especially if you have toiled away on the CV for ages but it is human nature unfortunately. Think back to the last time you were faced with a long article or column in the newspaper, if the headline didn’t grab you, you will probably scan the article quickly to see if anything else is going to make you read on. So we know keywords are important but my question to you is; do you know what keywords your CV is majoring on? Wouldn’t you be interested to find out that actually it’s not what you think it is?
Word Cloud – Keyword Discovery
The Arras People new website launch used the lovely Wordle website to create some of our new images. If you are not familiar with Wordle, it’s a website that creates “word clouds”. Word clouds are those things you sometimes see on blogs that quickly show a reader what kind of subjects are covered on that blog; the bigger the word (in font size) the more often that subject is covered on that blog. In this case Wordle allows you to post in anything and see what the common themes are in any one piece of text.
I encourage you to try Wordle out on your own current CV, just choose Create and copy and paste your CV in. You can play about with the colours, fonts and direction of text if you like too. Once you have entered your CV and seen the word cloud; is it what you would expect to see?
Take a look at the word cloud I created for a recent candidate, this is a Programme Office Co-ordinator, she’s been doing the job for over 5 years at a Programme level;
Interesting isn’t it? Working at a programme level and within a PMO for five years and it certainly doesn’t look like her CV is reflecting this well. Where are those keywords like PMO, Programme Office, Programme Co-ordinator?? Time to take another look at the CV and see if those crucial keywords can’t be incorporated better into the CV.
Have a go, and leave a comment letting me know what you think.
Great Article there’s some good stuff on this site!
In relation to this article I’d say a resume scan is more like 30 seconds these days with recruiters even more pressed for time.
Make sure that first page is a killer!!
Thanks,
Justin.