Imagine that you are a recruiter. You place an ad with a very explicit description of the position you are trying to fill. Immediately, you begin to get resumes. Hundreds, if not thousands of resumes pour in for this one position. You want the very best person for the job so you might copy and paste the contents of the resumes into a database and search for matches to the profile information that you have for the position. That would be a great way to weed out those candidates that don’t really match all of the attributes from your description. Though you may picture a recruiter reading over all of the resumes submitted, many recruiters use “resume matching software” to simplify the process of reading all of those boring resumes. What does that mean to you? Well, if you haven’t been getting calls for jobs that seem like they are perfect for you, then it just may be that your resume was never really read by a human being. You might not be making it past the resume matching software.

So how do you get your resume to be looked at for your terrific skills, especially in this tough economy? Start by looking carefully at the job description for specific descriptions of skills. If you possess those skills, then match the description on your resume to the job description as closely as possible. The more matches you possess to that job description, the more likely that the resume matching software will find you as a match.