SEO your CV …or is it Resume?
As social media, web3.0, mobiweb and clouds advance forward as a raging technology tsunami – a job seeker might well be asking themselves whats the best way of getting my CV or resume to a recruiter in a way that I can give myself the best chance of getting noticed.
Naturally we’ve all got our paper based version tucked away in the coffee stained folder marked “Job applications” that of course is a few years old or at least as old as the last time you were in the position of looking for work.
Any design oriented person would have ensured that their name was in 34 point bold, the font styles were
consistent and serif’less, the kerning of the letters would be perfectly formed together with a nice pantone #344 border around the CV ensuring that if the document was in a pile on someone’s desk – then the border would make it stand out and entice the reader to view it.
Line managers will soon turn to their trusty Google and query you.
Nowadays – of course your CV and application would be formatted, stored and searchable within monster.com, or uploaded to an applicant tracking system like
ours, and presented to the client in a nice structured manner together pre-filtered and qualified with automated scoring and evaluation criteria already wrapped and calculated. In essence you need to make sure the skills you are strongest in are of the appropriate keyword density and your location is clearly stated as in most cases recruiters love to hire local candidates.
Thats all great but how will it evolve. I expect as time moves on – the line managers (who get presented with the shortlist) might well turn to trusty Google and query you. Yes you! If you are at management level or advancing in your career then chances are someone may look for you on the search engines with a view to checking you out. So how do you make sure you will get found – especially if your name is quite common.
Setup your online CV
Today – its easy and I mean really easy..to setup an online profile of you. At a basic level you can go to
wordpress.com 
or
blogger.com (part of Google) and setup your own blog page. You may be a little more advanced and have already bought your domain name (well done) – if you haven’t, get it now as an exact match… ie. “FirstnameFamilyname.com” .. or .org .net .co.uk .org.uk. The next step would be to make sure you have a good profile on LinkedIn – in fact make sure your external URL has your name in it now. (its a bit of landgrab – just like facebook was when it let you choose your public URL)
Once you have something setup – if have read any of my previous articles you will know you need to focus on two areas. On and Off-page SEO. For On-page you need to follow these rules:
1) Ensure that your URL contains your name (firstnameFurname) or with a hyphen (firstname-surname) – but keep it simple and leave out your intials.
2) Then make sure the page title has your name and jobtitle.
The page title is set in the html right at the start under <head> and looks like this for example:
<title>Paul Bannister | Expresso Coffee Expert | London</title>
Its important that the job title is generic and is commonly used. Put yourself in the recruiters shoes and think what they might be looking for.
3) Then set the header H1 – and here I would put your name, but also your location.
Should look like this:
<h1>Paul Bannister - London</h1>
4) Lastly – use the description. It should look like this:
<meta name="description" content="Check you drink the best -
Hire an Expresso Coffee Expert for organic roasted and green beans
- Paul Bannister in London"/>
So the objective is to get your 2 or 3 key skills in the description.
The rest of your CV should sell yourself as normal. I’m not going to tell you how todo that as there is plenty great information our there for you.
The next step is the off-page SEO and backlinking – watch out for the next post where I’ll go into where the magic happens.
