WASHINTGON — The Labor Department reports there were a record 3.6 million job openings in August, and employers continue to cite a lack of job applicants with the required skills for the job openings they have.
Some job applicants may just be doing a poor job of presenting the skills they have.
Job openings are almost universally posted online these days, and those postings include detailed skill sets and experience that is required.
Employers often use either their own filters, or third party job sites with filters to ferret out the right candidates, so pay close attention to job descriptions, and game the system.
“The employer will have keywords in there that they will use to rank how relevant the resumes are that they’re receiving,” Jennifer Grasz at CareerBuilder told WTOP.
“So look at the keywords that employers are using in their job postings. Pepper them into your resume as it applies to your experience. It is going to help your resume come up higher in the pile,” she said.
A recent survey of small business owners by the National Federation of Independent Business found 38 percent of owners have job openings they can’t fill, with 89 percent of them citing few or no qualified applications for their open positions.
A record 25 percent of owners cited the difficulty of finding qualified workers as their single most important business problem.
Another recent survey of HR managers, conducted by CareerBuilder, found among top reasons job applicants aren’t called in for an interview include a resume without quantifiable results and a resume that is not customized to the exact job opening’s description and skills requirements.
