Great resumes stand out from the rest, get noticed and demand attention from employers. Creating an effective resume can greatly improve your chances of landing that dream job, so you want to put your best foot forward with the space you’ve got and the things you want to say.

Our Getting started with your Indeed Resume post showed how to create an Indeed Resume so that you’ll be visible to employers searching for candidates on Indeed. But what about the content of your resume? Here are three ways to make your Indeed resume shine.

1. Make a great first impression

Effective resumes quickly show a clear picture of the value you’ll bring to an employer. The Headline and Summary sections of your resume are a good place to start creating this picture. Indeed Resume users who have a Headline are more than twice as likely to be contacted by an employer than those who don’t have one.

Think of the Headline as a professional tagline that includes:

• The type of job you’re targeting and a description of your experience level
  Tip: If your previous or current title is unfamiliar to most employers, craft a title that accurately describes your expertise

• Specific qualifications or attributes that relevant employers will value

The Summary section can be used to further capture the reader’s attention by highlighting notable achievements, skills and professional attributes. Users who include a Summary are nearly twice as likely to be contacted than those who don’t. This section should be more extensive than the Headline, but keep it brief and focused.

Here’s an example of an effective Headline and Summary section:

• Headline: Senior-level Interior Designer with expertise in 3D modeling

• Summary: Senior-level Interior Designer with 8 years experience in space planning, remodeling and renovations for residential and commercial properties. Expert in 3D modeling and Computer-aided design (CAD).

If you have specialized training or certifications that are commonly described with acronyms, don’t assume that recruiters will know their meaning. Put acronyms in parentheses after the spelled out version to ensure these qualifications aren’t overlooked.

It should go without saying, but resumes with spelling mistakes or grammatical errors are likely to cause recruiters and hiring managers to stop reading. After carefully proofreading your resume, have a friend or colleague review it to help catch errors you may have missed.

2. Target the job you want

To make your resume stand out to relevant employers, it’s helpful to review job postings for the types of positions you’re qualified for and take note of:

• The desired skills and experience cited by the employer

• The responsibilities of the position

• The words/phrases used to describe the ideal candidate

This upfront research will reveal what details relevant employers will look for on your resume. For example, if the jobs you’re pursuing commonly cite public speaking experience as a desired skilled, make sure your resume includes examples of your public speaking history.

Studying resumes of people who hold, or have held the type of job you’re pursuing, is also useful. What skills and accomplishments do they emphasize? What does their career progression look like?  The answers should provide actionable ideas for how to showcase your experience. Click to search and view resumes.

3. Demonstrate success with details

To illustrate the value you’ll bring to a prospective employer, your resume’s ‘Work Experience’ section should emphasize the results you’ve delivered with specific examples that show how you did it and what measurable results you achieved. Use concise sentences and bullets to make these results stand out.

General claims make it difficult for employers to assess the value you provided to previous employers. Whenever possible, quantify your accomplishments. “Exceeded sales quota for seven straight quarters, growing new business by an average of 10% each quarter” is more impactful than “consistently met sales quotas”.

When notable contributions can’t be quantified, present them with details that describe results. Vague words and phrases like “oversaw” and “successfully developed” mean little unless they are substantiated.

Every day, thousands of employers search for candidates on Indeed Resume. Taking the time to create a resume that clearly communicates the benefits they’ll gain by hiring you can pay big dividends. Get started today!

Have you stumbled upon a job description that checked all the boxes for being concise, explanatory and compelling? Great job descriptions are direct response marketing materials in their own right. Their purpose is to attract quality hires and sell the opportunity with your organization. And the first step in attracting quality hires is making sure that people can find your job among a sea of others.

Search engines like Indeed work by scanning job titles and descriptions to show the most relevant match to a job seeker’s query. By writing effective job titles and detailed job descriptions, Indeed can make the best possible match with people’s search terms. This results in more qualified candidates clicking on and applying to your jobs. We put together our best tips for writing standout job descriptions to help your job postings get found and drive more qualified applications to your jobs.

Rank higher in search results with accurate job titles

Most people search by job title. To improve your placement in search results, keep the following in mind:

• Keep the job title concise, between 5 and 80 characters, and avoid all caps. If your title is too long or too short, it will not rank well. Also it’s important to not include special characters in your title. This makes it easier to read and more likely to match the search queries from job seekers.

• Describe the job title in normal terms. If you are hiring a “Javascript Developer”, call it that. Avoid phrases like “Ninja” and “Jedi” that people are less likely to search for.

• Avoid internal titles that don’t accurately describe the job. Job seekers may misunderstand abbreviations or acronyms. “Senior Web Designer” is much clearer to applicants than “Web Designer II.”

• Use the job title to describe the main aspects of the job. For example, “Events and Sponsorships Manager” is much more effective than just “Marketing.”

Attract the right applicants with specific and interesting job descriptions

The key to writing effective job descriptions is to strike a balance between being concise and providing just enough detail so that job seekers can self-qualify. Jobs with descriptions between 700 and 2000 words get on average 30% more applies. To attract qualified candidates,

• Open with a strong, attention-grabbing paragraph. Your ideal candidates are busy and if you don’t pique their interest in the beginning, there is a higher risk of them moving on to the next job. Take this time to show the job seeker what makes your company a special place to work and why this job is a great opportunity.

• Be honest. Do not exaggerate or underplay the responsibilities of the role. If it’s a marketing manager role that requires 80% time to be spent in social media, describe the role as being primarily social media focused so that you reach candidates who are skilled in this area.

• Talk about what the day-to-day would be like. If the position requires 20% travel or calls for 50% writing, tell them that. This will ensure you’re hiring candidates who enjoy their day-to-day responsibilities.

• Cite specific educational/certification requirements. If some skills are required and others are just nice to have, say that. If candidates think they are under qualified, they won’t want to waste their time applying.

• Ask that candidates only apply if they meet your requirements. This should deter unqualified applicants from “taking a chance” on your job posting.

• Specify desired years of experience.

• Indicate how the job functions within the organization or who the job reports to. Candidates want to know how their role will impact an organization.

• Provide the specific job location and your company name. Broad locations like “national” or “US” will likely not show up in searches.

• Give job seekers a sense of your organization’s style and culture. This may also include an overview of employee benefits, salary, schedule and other perks.

• Finally, break up paragraphs with empty lines to make your description easy to read.

After creating a compelling job title and description, keep going. Test variations of job titles and descriptions to determine which ones draw the most qualified applicants. Indeed provides Job Analytics and performance reports that you can use to test which titles and descriptions receive the most traffic and produce the most qualified candidates.

Like all marketing activities, job titles and descriptions tailored to your target audience result in higher conversion rates. Clear titles and detailed job descriptions allow the right talent to find your jobs.

New data from iCIMS, a leading Applicant Tracking System (ATS) provider, shows its clients hire more people from Indeed than from all other job sites combined and 6X more than LinkedIn. This is the fifth recent source of hire report showing that Indeed leads the way as the top site for external hires.

According to iCIMS, “Indeed alone accounted for more hires than all other branded sources combined and stood far out from the pack, delivering 27% of all external hires.”

iCIMS reviewed a full year of data from 2012 covering 100,000 hires made from external sources by more than 1,500 employers. The data used in this study was based on source data that was automatically tracked by the iCIMS ATS. This feature eliminated the risk of candidates falsely identifying their source by automatically detecting the true origin of a candidate for accurate reporting. The companies ranged in size from 10 employees to over 100,000.

Knowing the sources of your candidates and hires is essential for evaluating the performance of your recruitment efforts. If you’re already using an ATS, you can easily create your own source of hire report to understand what sources deliver the best ROI.

If you’re not currently using an ATS, you can post jobs to Indeed and benefit from driving traffic from the top online external source of hire site.

We’re now introducing Indeed Resume in six new countries: the UK, France, Spain, India, Australia and the Netherlands. Indeed Resume provides employers with open access to over 2 million new resumes created on Indeed each month. There are no signup fees, subscriptions or contracts when you use Indeed Resume. Instead of charging expensive fees that restrict access to talent, we’re keeping resume search open to help employers and job seekers connect.

Easy, secure user experience fuels resume growth

Why are we seeing such rapid growth in online resumes? The resume is a core component of the hiring process, used by employers to quickly assess relevant skills and experience. And they’re not just used when a candidate submits a job application anymore; recruiters proactively search for resumes that fit their open positions. More professionals are realizing that having an up-to-date online resume helps market their skills for both current and future career opportunities.

Indeed Resume allows people to make their experience visible to employers while contact information is kept confidential until they respond to an employer’s email via Indeed. This secure environment increases the quality of engagement between employers and qualified applicants.

And now, more people than ever are using their Indeed Resumes to apply directly to jobs. Using an Indeed Resume saves time in the application process — and makes it possible for people to apply directly from a mobile device. Indeed Resume is valuable, easy and secure and is quickly becoming the #1 source for connecting recruiters with top talent.

Employers can search millions of resumes 

For employers, Indeed Resume offers a large source of resumes from every field with no financial commitment. Recruiters searching on Indeed Resume can target any combination of title, location, company, skills, experience level and education, and then use filters to narrow search results further to give precise results. If you’re not sure what to search for, start typing and we’ll start showing results as you type. You can also save your search by opting in to receive new and relevant resumes matching the profile of your target candidate straight to your email.

Recruiters are constantly searching for qualified candidates online. Indeed Resume provides them with open access to millions of potential resumes which match their target searches. With Indeed Resume going international, recruiters in the UK, France, Spain, India, Australia and the Netherlands can now identify and connect with highly targeted candidates using the search criteria that matter most to them.

For more information about recruiting with Indeed Resume, see:

Four simple tips for hiring with Indeed Resume

Advanced Indeed Resume search tips

Connecting with candidates on Indeed Resume

Find the right candidates today

Smartphone adoption has grown faster than any other consumer technology in history—including the PC revolution in the 80s, internet boom in the 90s and social media today. With worldwide mobile internet usage set to surpass desktop over the next year, the number of job searches coming from mobile is rapidly increasing. Now, more than ever, it’s important to offer a mobile-optimized site experience for job candidates.

We’re already seeing the impact mobile has on the recruiting process. Today, one-third of visits to Indeed come directly from mobile devices. Our mobile traffic has more than doubled over the last year, and our Job Search app for iOS and Android is the #1 job search app worldwide.

However, very few companies – even the largest employers – have a career site that lets mobile visitors easily find or apply to jobs. The fact that job candidates can’t apply from their mobile devices creates a serious recruiting disadvantage. If you’re an employer, you need to make sure your jobs can be found in mobile search and most importantly, give people the ability to apply directly from mobile devices.

To solve this problem, we developed Indeed Apply:

Indeed Apply

With Indeed Apply, qualified candidates can easily apply to jobs on desktop and mobile devices with a cover letter and an Indeed Resume, or a traditional resume file. Over half a million jobs on Indeed and our partner sites now support Indeed Apply. These jobs are clearly labeled in Indeed’s search results to let users know which jobs have this easy application method.

Since its launch last year, more than 23 million job applications have been submitted via Indeed Apply, with 3.4 million in the past 30 days alone.

How it Works

Indeed Apply is available to every employer for free. For employers with career sites, Indeed Apply can be integrated directly with your site or with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). A list of ATSes that currently offer Indeed Apply can be found here. If your ATS doesn’t offer Indeed Apply or you’d like to add it directly to your career site, contact us.

If you don’t have a dedicated career site, jobs that you post directly on Indeed will automatically include Indeed Apply and be optimized for mobile viewing, appropriately displayed on mobile devices and be ready to receive applications from mobile candidates. When someone applies, you’ll receive applicants the same way that you do today – either through an applicant tracking system (ATS) or sent directly to you by email. By using Indeed Apply on all of your jobs, you’ll reach more tech-savvy, qualified candidates, and ultimately make more hires.

Contact us to learn more about setting up Indeed Apply for your jobs, and help candidates apply to your jobs, from wherever they are.