The great challenge of our time is discoverability. This is true for cultural products, but also for job seekers. Without the right keywords in a LinkedIn profile, there’s a good chance an application will fall through the cracks of a recruiter. Here are some tips on how to find the right words.
1) Put yourself in the recruiter/employer’s shoes
To begin with, you need to adopt the right perspective, that of the person looking for candidates.
You have to think about what the employer is going to look for in a profile like ours,” says Nihel Debbih, recruiter and career coach. What kind of keywords are they going to write in their search bar? Because, one thing is for sure, he won’t search for the words “looking for an internship/job/challenge…” He will enter a job title and technical skills.”
2) Combing through existing postings
Next, Nihel Debbih suggests the following exercise:
From 3-5 job postings in your field, you identify the skills most often requested by highlighting the most frequent keywords.”
These postings can be found on LinkedIn, on job search sites or even directly on company sites, in the career section.
3) Use a search engine to validate your choices
In addition to this manual collection, you can use the search engine of Google, LinkedIn or your favorite job search site to validate a choice of words or to decide between two options. Let’s take an example from the world of advertising: is it better to enter “creative director” or “creative director”?
A search for this job title in the LinkedIn search engine reveals that the former gets many more hits than the latter (5,700 versus 1,700), and a similar result is found in a Google search, which reports 3,490 “creative director” jobs versus 105 “creative director” jobs on Isarta.
4) Explore specialized resources
Job seekers can also use search engines specific to their field of activity. Nihel Debbih draws attention to the engines developed by marketer-influencer Neil Patel, such as “Uber suggest” and “Answer the public“, or a more generalized keyword analysis tool like “Keyword Tool”.
Resume building applications can also be relevant. Some tools are powered by artificial intelligence to optimize the keywords of your CV. Rezi and Jobscan are two English-speaking resume building platforms that allow you to optimize your resume according to your target position. In the French-speaking world, we only found the French application CVmaker, whose paid packages include “keyword optimization for a better search in ATS systems”.
Good profile optimization!
