TIPS & MYTHS
Hype & Multiple Confusions
MAIN POINTS:
All of these terms and concepts get mixed up into meaningless and misleading fog by résumé writers and résumé “experts” slopping out wordage full of recycled nonsense for their sales talk, social media postings, website articles, TV and radio appearances, seminars, podcasts, and other publications/publicity. This is because a lot of it has been copied and recopied and chopped up and taken out of context continuously for over twenty years by people who didn’t understand what they were talking about. (If you have nothing better to do, click here for a bit more about the history.)
Things will be much clearer if you think of keywords as a topic all to itself, essentially independent of technology, though the different technologies do have minor implications for the way you use keywords in résumés. Keywords were important long before any of the technologies came on the scene.
ATS and AI refer to technologies used by employers to search résumé for keywords. SEO is the practice of making sure keywords in a document function effectively for the document provider’s objectives when the document is searched for keywords—most typically when a document on the Internet is searched by search engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Keywords, in résumés, are common terms for job titles, skills, key technology, sub-specialties, types of experience, key industry players, and other factors. A large and growing number of employers and recruiters use applicant-tracking systems (ATS) that process digital résumés and search them for keywords that are used as indicators of an applicant’s suitability for a given job. The documents are scored on the basis of the keyword count. Resumes that don’t meet a minimum score will probably be rejected. Recruiters will look through the rest, and decisions about who gets called in for an interview may be made partly on the basis of those scores, though some recruiters ignore them.
Obviously, keywords are extremely important. But they’re still vastly overhyped and misunderstood, and there is a lot of misinformation out there about what words function as keywords.