BUILD A SEARCH-FRIENDLY RESUME

Today, you need two versions of your resume with the same information formatted in different ways. You should have a beautifully formatted copy of your resume printed out to hand to potential employers during interviews.

You also need an electronic copy of your resume formatted to be read by computers, not people.  Lose the bullet points and careful spacing and reformat the whole document as plain text (.txt).  Pepper the document with keywords used in the employer's job description, and computers will recognize that you have the right experience for the position - and that you know it.


SOCIAL WORK KEYWORDS

The best place to find the keywords you need to include in your resume in order to get the attention of the screening computer is in the job descriptions of your target employers.  However, there are some buzzwords associated with social work that show up repeatedly in social work job descriptions and are thus fairly likely to get the results you want.

Some of those words are: advocacy, outreach, fundraising, program development, treatment, diagnosis, counselor, and case manager.  While using some general keywords makes it easier to customize your resume for each job, you should still pull keywords from the description for every position you apply for.