Reading a job posting for the words that matter
Okay you guys. Last time we talked about bringing the job you want, not the job you had. Now we're going to actually get a job posting in front of you and pull it apart, because a job posting isn't just an ad. It's a list of the exact words a computer and a human are both going to go looking for.
Pull up the posting for the job you're aiming at. If you don't have one picked yet, borrow one that's close. We're not writing anything yet, we're just reading like a detective.
Print it or paste it somewhere you can mark it up
I want you to get your hands on this thing the same way you'd get your hands on a recipe you're about to mess with. Print it if you can. If not, paste it into a blank document with room around it.
Now read it slow. Not the way you skim a job posting when you're scrolling on your phone at ten at night. Slow.
Circle the repeats
Here's the trick nobody tells you. Whatever word or phrase shows up more than once in a posting, that's not an accident. Companies write these things fast and they don't repeat themselves for fun. If "customer follow-up" shows up in the job summary and again in the requirements, that's a word the hiring manager cares about and it's probably a word their tracking software is scanning for too.
Circle every repeat. That's your first list.
Sort the rest into two piles
Everything else on the posting goes into one of two piles.
Pile one: the must-haves. Usually this is labeled "requirements" or "qualifications." Read this section like it's a checklist for you personally. If you're missing something on this list, don't panic yet, we'll deal with that later. Just mark it.
Pile two: the nice-to-haves. Usually labeled "preferred" or buried in the description as "familiarity with" or "exposure to." These matter less. Don't build your whole résumé chasing something in this pile.
Honestly, I see people spend all their energy trying to prove they meet a "preferred" qualification and completely ignore three "required" ones sitting right above it. Read the label. It's telling you something.
Watch for the verbs
This is the part people skip and it's the part I think matters most. Job postings use verbs on purpose. "Manage," "coordinate," "lead," "support," "assist." Those are not interchangeable. If the posting says "manages a team of four," that's a different job than "supports a team of four," and if your résumé says "helped with" when the posting says "managed," you've already told them you're not the person they described.
Underline every verb in the requirements section. Then go check what verbs you're using on your own résumé for similar work. We'll match those up in a later lesson, but start noticing now.
A word about the fancy version of this
I want to tell you about a thing my sister-in-law Jo did, because it's a good example of effort going the wrong direction. She downloaded one of those job-posting "keyword analyzer" tools, the kind that scans the posting and spits out a color-coded report with charts. She was so proud of it. Showed me on her laptop, this whole rainbow breakdown of word frequency and importance scores.
I looked at it for about ten seconds and told her to close the laptop and just read the posting herself with a highlighter. She didn't love that answer. But the tool wasn't wrong exactly, it just did a slower, worse version of something she could do in her head in five minutes once she knew what to look for. And she still had to go back and actually read the posting anyway to make sense of the chart. Skip the middleman. You're building the skill, not the report.
My opinion on this, for what it's worth
Every line on your résumé should be something a stranger could verify. That opinion applies here too, from the other direction. If the posting says "manages vendor relationships" and you're going to claim that skill, you'd better have something specific behind it. Don't grab a keyword just because it was circled. Grab it because it's true and you can back it up. We'll get to matching your actual experience to these words in the next lesson. For today, just find them.
Before next time
Do this same read-and-mark exercise on the actual posting for the job you're going after, not a stand-in. Bring the marked-up copy with you.