Christien Louviere

I have been using TheLadders for just over six months now to see what the hype was all about.  To be honest, I have been less than thrilled.  I was browsing some of the highlights over at the $100K+ job board SalesLadder.com.  They posted the “Top 100 Recruiter Search Words” used in the past week.  Something that stuck out to me is how general the Top 25 terms (shown below) are.  I thought the purpose of resume filters was for recruiters to filter out resumes they don’t want to be bothered with.  The number one search term is ‘sales.’  Well, anyone that has spent a minute on Monster.com can tell you that would bring up something such as ‘entry-level sports marketing’ or some other turnstile position.  In fact, the top 25 lists pretty vague terms.  The first somewhat specific term I see is #10, ‘business development.’

TheLadders suggestion is to use the terms that describe you perfectly and use them in your resume.  Ok?  Is this what I’m paying for?

I have ‘sales’ all over my resume and so does the freshly minted graduate that was selling raffle tickets to the latest Greek fundraiser this past spring.  Every recruiter I’ve spoken to wants to hear about awards won, unique achievements and/or hard numbers.  I don’t see any of these terms listed in the top 100.    TheLadders big selling point is that it will separate you from all the rest.  I’d like to know what TheLadders does to screen their recruiters.

1 sales
2 CPA
3 Marketing
4 Human Resources
5 software
6 tax
7 controller
8 manufacturing
9 engineer
10 business development
11 finance
12 SAP
13 Java
14 healthcare
15 tax manager
16 Construction
17 software sales
18 project manager
19 product manager
20 operations
21 accountant
22 accounting
23 supply chain
24 recruiter
25 Retail