Keywords are an important ingredient in putting together your resume and a vital piece of Career Development’s Steps for Success. Most employers and recruiters use specific keywords to determine whether or not you are a possible match for their open positions. This week’s blog highlights Do’s and Don’ts for incorporating keywords into your resume as determined by a job posting of your ideal position..

Do – use the job boards!  Searching for your previous position titles, techniques and tools you’ve used, or professional organizations you belong to on the internet job boards will produce your results. Take your time looking through the list of postings until you find 3-5 jobs that you would ideally like to have.

Don’t – restrict your search radius when looking for your ideal positions. Use the search terms box but leave the location blank. By doing this you’ll get the maximum number of results for your search.

Do – use abbreviations and acronyms as well as writing out the entire term or phrase. If you use “SSAS” and “SQL Server Analysis Services” you will increase your chances of having your resume end up in employers’ filtered results.

Don’t – emphasize keywords that relate to jobs you’re NOT interested in. Most of us have work experience that is not related to what we’re doing now or what we want to be doing in the future. Be careful not to overload your resume with keywords from those positions or you’ll end up being contacted for positions outside your desired area.

Do – include soft skills. These are transferable skills that can be taken from one position to the next and between industries. Create a list of these as well as personal traits, such as “hard working,” “dedicated,” and “creative” that you can include throughout your resume in your summary and job descriptions.

Don’t – go overboard! You will want to limit the number of keywords you use. There can be too much of a good thing, so be careful when incorporating these terms into your resume. Remember, a handful of keywords should be added to make your resume stand out in a positive way, but too many can overwhelm the reader and make you appear desperate to connect with any position out there.

To get you started, here are some general key words that all of you can use when putting together your resumes! Microsoft, remoting, develop/development, maintain/maintenance, analysis, and design.

For those of you who are in or looking to get into Business Intelligence: reporting, data warehouse, services, lifecycle, modeling, and queries.

SQL Server: reporting, stored procedures, systems, database, architecture, and administrator

.Net: object oriented, software, framework, applications, platform, and web services

SharePoint: architect/architecture, KPIs, dashboards, portal, reporting services, and workflow