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Writing Skills for Job Searching

It doesn’t matter how good your resume is or how great your interviewing skills are, if you don’t apply for the right jobs.  Now that using online job search engines has become the norm, it is important to learn the writing skills for job searching.  Just finding a job that fits your skill set can be difficult if you do not know the type of language that is used by job search engines.  Here are some tips to keep in mind when trying to create or refine your writing skills for job searching.

1.    Associating Industries With Keywords

When using a job search engine, it is important that you are able to identify what industries or types of jobs that you are interested in.  For example, if you are interested in sales, the most obvious keyword is “sales”, however if you do this, there is a good chance that you will get a lot of results that do not apply to you.  This is because you will not only get job listing about the type of sales that you want, but every sales position that is available.  It is best to add an industry modifier before “sales” such as: auto sales, medical sales, direct sales, phone sales, etc.  If you are not sure what type of industry you are interested in, then feel free to search with “sales jobs” first and then take note of the industry modifiers that best express your interests.

2.    Associating Skills With Keywords

It is also important that you can identify your skills and find the keywords that are being used to describe them.  Instead of searching by job type, you can instead search based upon a set of skills.  This is particularly useful if you are wanting to explore different job postings that you may qualify for.  By searching based upon skills, you will likely get results that span a wide variety of industries and give you an idea of what job opportunities are available to you.  Additionally, this type of job search is also useful for people who have special qualifications or skills that cross industries.  For example, if you are a CAD programmer, then there is a large number of industries that might employ you.  In this case, it is better to search by skill (i.e. cad jobs) rather than industry.

3.    Specification By Subtraction

Going back to the sales example, maybe you are open to a variety of different industries or positions, however you definitely do not want to do phone sales.  In this case, you can actually get rid of all of the phone sales positions by subtraction.  To do this you would type in “sales -phone”.  This will tell the search engine that you want all of the results that have the keyword “sales”, but will also filter out any sales jobs that include the word “phone” in them.  You can do this with any set of keywords.  This is also useful when you notice that one or two companies dominate the search results and you don’t want to see any more of their results.  You can enter “-company” and all of the postings from this company will not be included in your search results.

As you can see, just finding relevant job postings require a certain set of writing skills. Fortunately, these writing skills for job searching can be quickly learned and prove to be very effective at narrowing down your search results, thus making the entire process more effective.