It's DigitalMarketing

Competition for a job is usually fierce at the best of times, but in our current economic climate it’s become considerably more challenging.

With the announcement this week that unemployment in the UK has hit a 12 year high of nearly 2 million, the job market is flooded with people chasing a smaller pool of vacancies (approx. 500,000 according to PM Gordon Brown).

Whilst watching the news recently and pondering how these unfortunate people would be able to set themselves apart from the competition when it came to job interviews, it occurred to me that perhaps the biggest priority would be to be spotted in the first place. How do you stand out in the crowd and avoid being lost in the pile?

Then in an odd leap of thought, I noticed the similarities with search marketing and specifically SEO.

Think about it – millions of people and their CVs trying to be noticed by recruiters = millions of webpages trying to noticed by searchers.

So if a Search Marketer can apply SEO techniques to a webpage, can you take any of those learnings to optimise your chances of being discovered?

I think you can, thanks to online recruitment.

Most job sites nowadays have a CV database, where job seekers can upload their CV and make it searchable by recruiters. This can speed up the process of being found, open you up to wider selection of jobs and generally take some of the difficulty out of job hunting.

But with so many people potentially in the database how do you optimise your CV to ensure you get noticed? (for the sake of this post, I’m assuming you have employable skills that a recruiter is looking for)

The answer is all to do with the content of your CV.

To illustrate my point, I’ll reference what I wrote in an article for Jobsite.co.uk in January:

It is up to you to make sure your CV contains the correct information and key words that are going to make the recruiter take notice. The searching technology may be ground-breaking but it is only as good as the information you put into it.

And that’s a key point that many job seekers forget. There needs to be a mindset change from the traditional CV. The Word document you once used to hand over to employers needs a little more thought – in a nutshell, it needs to be optimised for search.

To continue from the article:

When you use Google or Jobsite, you type in words to describe the thing you are looking for, such as ‘books’ or ‘sales jobs’. Pages are returned in the results that contain these words. It’s exactly the same with your CV. To make sure you’re found you need to ensure you include the right words that recruiters are searching for.

For example, if you’re an IT programmer, you may mention in your CV: ‘For the past seven years I have worked on several large scale projects, utilising a variety of different programming languages.’

A recruiter with your CV in her hand might be very interested in you, liking your experience and your abilities. However, if she is searching online for an IT programmer with specific skills such as .Net, C++ and Java, there is no way she’ll be able to find your CV because it does not explicitly state the skills. You may have those skills, but the search engine cannot guess that – you need to include that information.

Another common mistake people make is not considering the variations on their CV keywords. In search marketing, you’ll do this as a matter of course – whether its optmising meta tags or on-page copy or building ad campaign keyword lists, you’ll think of all the alternatives. For example, when using the terms Search Engine Optimisation or Pay per Click, you’ll also use the alternative terms PPC or SEO.

A final piece of advice, which I’ve given previously in a forum discussion on Econsultancy.com, would be to be careful of keyword spam. In search marketing, we’re all aware of the consequences of trying to cheat the system, but it can apply to job hunting too.

From my Econsultancy comment:

Make sure your CV contains the relevant terms for your skills and job titles. Don’t spam it – that will put people off – just ensure the words are included in your text.

Having seen CVs full of spammed keywords, I can ensure you it is off putting and is more likely to negatively influence the recruiter, rather than make them want to congratulate the candidate on their ‘ingenuity’.

So for me, it seems there are some pretty solid parallels between SEO and preparing your CV for job hunting. Hopefully there are some useful learnings here for anyone who has the misfortune to suddenly be in the position to need to apply them.

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