Are you in the process of an online jobs search?  If you're using a social networking job board like Inovahire.com, you can increase the chances of successfully landing a job.  By creating a free personal profile and making it public, now companies can search for you! 

A social networking job board offers a bi-directional search.  In one direction there's the traditional flow of you, the job seeker, searching for a job of interest followed by your submittal of a resume.  Now with social networking, there's the additional flow of a company searching the social network resume database using key words to find you as a candidate of interest.  This provides jobs options that you might never know existed!

Now that a company can search for you, the question is, will they be able to find you?  You owe it to yourself to take a fresh look at your online resume and make sure it's key word searchable for the job you want.

Let's take an engineering job for example.  Suppose you're looking for a job designing chips for a networking company.  Your experience could relate to various types of chips such as FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays), ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits), SoC (System-on-a-Chip), each manufactured by different companies you'd also want to identify for a search.  As well, the design language you have experience with could be Verilog or VHDL.  This is true for simulation and design layout tools as well.  Try as best possible to use "industry standard" vs. company specific acronyms.  In all this resume detail, it's also possible to miss basic words that employers may search for such as "design", "engineer" or even "electrical" or "electronics".  If you're a lead designer or manage designers, and have experience with scheduling tools, you'll also want to make sure that you provide those related searchable key words so you don't get left out as the employer refines their search looking for that experience.

I suggest you add a small section in your resume called "Key Experience Search Words".   Add words to this section in a way that pertains to your job experience and the job you're looking for.  Include variations on the same word if you think it could be used in a candidate search.  For example, an electrical engineer looking for a lead role for a chip design in a networking company, it could look like:

Key Experience Search Words:

electrical, electronics, network, networking, design, engineer, lead, manage, manager, ASIC, SoC, Verilog, (continue on here and make this robust, with actual ASIC manufacturers you've worked with as well as the names of SW tool companies you have experience with).   

You're worth the effort to do the work required to represent yourself in the best possible "searchable" light.  Only after a company finds you, do you have the chance to make that successful job connection.

By:  Laura Parrish

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