In today's digital age it's imperative that you rewrite your CV with the Internet in mind - having a great CV and a great career is no longer enough.  You must ensure that your Curriculum Vitae is loaded with appropriate keywords and skill words to enable your C.V. to be found!

Believe it or not the software that many recruitment businesses use, including Aaron Wallis, is able to read your CV and populate the recruitment database with your details and skills with 96% accuracy (that’s 4% greater than average human accuracy!) The software then applies keyword matching and artificial intelligence to match candidates to vacancies.

Many job boards and direct employers are also now adopting this software so it has never been more imperative to re-write your CV for the digital age ensuring that it is loaded with keywords and skills to enable you to be found!

How recruitment software works

The most simplistic way to explain this is let’s say, for instance that a company is looking to hire a web developer with ‘Dreamweaver’ and ‘PHP Programming’ experience. They will simply place these terms into a search and ‘voila’ up comes candidates with both the requirements.

Some of the most up to date ‘CV parsing and searching’ software like we use here at Aaron Wallis uses an algorithm to determine how relevant your skills are to a job. Believe it or not it scans your experience, skills and length of time in each role and then predicts the likelihood of you succeeding in the role that we are searching to fill! It is not so simple for sales professionals unfortunately (or luckily for us as a specialist sales recruiter!). Firstly look at the term sales – some call it ‘selling’, others ‘business development’, others ‘prospecting and closing’, etc. Then look at sales job titles. To one Sales Manager a ‘guy out on the road’ is a ‘Sales Representative’ to another a ‘Field Sales Executive’ to another a ‘Business Development Manager’ and to another an ‘Area Manager’, etc. So therefore you have to hedge your bets’ and include various keywords within your CV to be ‘found’ by recruiters and employers.

How to optimise your CV for the internet

CV parsing software, used by many of the leading recruiters, extracts your personal details and address from your CV automatically and populates their recruitment database. Therefore to give it the best chance of success (and ultimately your best chance of success) place your name, address, Date of Birth, telephone numbers, etc at the top of your CV. Your postcode is imperative as the software determines the best placed candidates using ‘postcode lookup’ processes. A neat little cheat would be to use the postcode of your employers, university and references to trick less sophisticated software into bringing your CV up as a result.

Search Engines, Job Boards and Recruitment Software use keyword matching software to help them fill their roles.