Find the Job Requirements

A good ad for a position often tells you tasks that are required of you daily. Get more details about what’s required in this position from a seasoned professional because they can often tell you more details about the office politics, responsibilities and special skills this position requires.

Companies use AI Bots to scan text and PDFs to see if resumes meet their requirements. You must make it easy for bots to scan and read.

You must have the keywords the bots are searching for. The hard part is to figure out the keywords. The job listing will be using those keywords when they list requirements. Scan job ads, job descriptions, job requirements and figure out what those keywords are (described in more detail below).

An Example Job Ad

These are responsibilities listed for a project manager in an actual job listing. This list could also be called Required Skills.

• Working with stakeholders to define program scope, assign responsibilities, identify appropriate resources, and develop milestones to ensure timely completion of projects based on published delivery dates.
• Creating and maintaining multiple complex and concurrent project plans.
• Communicating within the virtual team, to stakeholders, and to senior management.
• Developing training plans and writing documentation as needed.
• Drafting program materials, templates, documentation, and other assets.
• Tracking and monitoring progress, defining key performance indicators or success metrics, and reporting on status against program objectives.

Skills that are easy to see from this is that the job requires:

• somebody who can communicate well to various teams as well as upper management
• can create documents that help in communicating to many stakeholders
• can manage schedules and progress given to various stakeholder teams
• must be capable of understanding complex methods and topics and simplify these methods for users as well as stakeholder teams.

Inside Knowledge

What’s not obvious about this job is that none of these stakeholder teams are direct reports to this job (meaning they work for somebody else). Convincing a whole bunch of people to listen to you when you don’t have the luxury of firing them means you must have leadership skills, know how to negotiate, maintain credibility and generally be more prepared than any other stakeholder. In short, you must earn key stakeholders’ respect.