With so many people looking for jobs, finding the right person to fill your role can be a challenge. It’s like finding someone whose only distinguishing mark is a small pin on his or her lapel. It requires a lot of effort just to make sure you get the right person in the position. First, you need to know what position needs filling, which means creating a job out of scratch sometimes. Then, you need to write a job description that matches what duties you need addressed. After getting the description ready, you need to make it so that job seekers are able to find you online. But how do you make the description something that brings people to your posting? By using keywords, of course, as well as making sure you post it in the right places.
The keys to their kingdom
Keywords are search terms that people are most likely to use when looking for a job. They’re the little terms that draw people’s attention, based on their skills, experiences and job location. Monster suggests that a way to figure out what keywords work for the position you’re looking to fill is to read over the job description you wrote. What phrases are most relevant to the position? Would these terms be something a job seeker would actually find?
“Job keywords often come from relevant terms in your posting.”
For the first question, WonderHowTo recommends using a word cloud generator. This type of app creates an image where the most common and relevant terms are up front and center or appear most prominently. So if you’re looking for someone in IT who can handle Python, your job description should be able to show off terms that relate to it, such as “data structures” or dictionaries of the non-Oxford kind.
In the second question, the answer lies in keyword analytics, which is software that actually looks to see if people actually search for what you’re hoping for them to look for. The standard tool that is often used is Google Keyword Planner, though there are various other tools out there. Going through these, you should be able to find the right keywords. Planting them strategically in your job post will help bolster your chances on hitting someone who will apply to your job posting.
One place where you can place keywords is in the job title itself. This is because the title will not only be read by the job seeker, but it will also be seen by search engine bots that will index your job posting and rank it based on its relevance.
