Jobyssey

Do you have an unusual skillset, a willingness to relocate, or a fairly senior job title? If finding you is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, potential employers may be using Google to find you. How can you make sure that your CV is easy to find through a search engine? Try the following:

1. Have an HTML copy of your CV with a SEO-friendly file name, title and meta tags- a good choice would be along the lines of mydomain.com/webPHPdevelopercv.html or similar with a useful title along the same lines. Use the meta keywords to provide several alternate job titles (”cake developer, web developer, php developer, php programmer, web team lead, CV, resume”) or your most critical skills, and the meta description to sum up what you’re looking for, including location (”PHP Developer with M.Sc. in Computer Science for lead developer role in Dublin, Cork, or elsewhere in Ireland”).
2. Relevant content at the top- Search engines will look for content that validates your meta tags in the first few lines of your page. Put a 3-4 sentence experience summary at the top that’s pretty keyword heavy. This is also a good way to help viewers decide quickly if they should consider reading.
3. Skill keywords- Use the terminology you think potential employers will use to find you. If something is a core skill, it should be mentioned more than once. Make sure you also cover more general or umbrella terms for your skills. And, as always, don’t keyword spam- experienced hiring managers have finely tuned BS detectors and will assume that a too-good-to-be-true skill set probably is.
4. Links to past employers, schools, and projects- Having certain employers on your CV can be a mark of quality for some hiring managers or HR people, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to run a search for “developer CV link:google.com” to find people who are alums of a particular company. Be sure that all of the employer and school names on your CV are links to their home pages.
5. Links to your CV from other pages- Links are always good, so at a minimum link from your own page to your CV. If you have an opportunity to get anyone else to link to it (say, a friend adding a blog post about your search for work), go for it.
6. Don’t go nuts with the bells and whistles- Keep in mind that search engines have trouble with Javascript, images without alt tags, and so on. From a stylistic point of view as well, your web cv or resume should look a lot like a normal CV and be both easy to read and print. Put the fancy stuff in your portfolio and give it a prominent link off your website.