Harry wrote an interesting post on the prevalence of Keyword Spam. He defines keyword spam as the flotsam and jetsam of keywords on your resume, and he's not so happy with it.
Keyword spam is a long string of words at the end of a resume put there by the job-seeker in the hopes of improving his chances that a recruiting researcher will find it in a given resume database.
Harry points out it's impossible to be all things to all people, and having a long list of keywords is actually a turn off for recruiters.
As a marketing recruiter, I'm starting to think like Google: If I suspect that you are keyword loading your resume in a superficial way that diminishes [my] user experience, I am going to penalize you by moving you down in my [candidate] rankings.
Now I'm a big fan of Harry, and I can see how in executive search he might have a point, but I think he's way off on his reasoning.
Keyword spam exists because the employers created it. We are the ones that use technical programs that scrape resumes for keywords. We are the ones that encouraged huge databases that filter and sort information based on KEYWORDS. We are even the ones that have encouraged candidates to add lots of keywords to their resumes, so they show up high in our search results.
Asking a candidate to voluntarily disarm in the SEO war be ignoring keywords when all of the ATS systems available search on keywords is a mistake. Especially when your skills are managing a team. If a developer can use a hundred keywords so that he matches up to the impossible job descriptions written by hiring managers, why can't an executive stuff their resume to make sure their resume gets caught up in your search? Personally, I see this as a new market for SEM. Imagine an executive paying to have his resume show up highly for his desired searches. Joel - take it away.
Resume tip below the fold.
I agree with Harry that keyword spam is annoying to look at, but since it's necessary to get found by Applicant Tracking Systems, there's a way to deal with it.
Put the keyword spam on a back page, and don't have any identifying marks on it. If you want to get really tricky, change the font of the keywords to white on white. With any luck, the recruiter will pull your resume up because they keyword hits were correct, but when she prints your resume, she'll ignore the blank page. The blank page is read by the computer, but visually doesn't bother the recruiter.
