Step 2: Dissect the job description

- Now that you know where you want to go it's time to move on to step two, dissect the job description. So what do I mean by dissect? For the purpose of this course, dissect means we are going to look for keywords on the JD that'll help us tailor our resume. The reason we do this, because JDs are the recruiter's way of giving you a secret pass to the interview. They're essentially telling you, "Hey, hint, hint. We're looking for candidates who have these skills, experience, and keywords on your resume." So we want to listen to that hint and start showing off that we do. So here's the JD. We're going to dissect this one together, and I want you to do the same with the JD you saved earlier. We first want to break down the JD into the three most important elements the title, responsibilities, and requirements. And now we want to look for five keywords and themes that pop up to us. Later on, we'll take this information and use it to help shape our own resume accordingly. Fair warning, my friend, this may seem a bit complicated when we first do this and that is 100% normal. This is a skill that's important to build up now that you can take with you for the rest of your career and edit any other time you're looking for a new job. All right, so keywords and themes. We have two ways to do this. Option one, we can use a free word cloud generator we find online. So putting the example JD into this generator, we get these words that appear the most based off their size marketing, digital, analytics, social, paid, and website. And now, method two. We can use the eye test, which I personally prefer. We want to look out for words that repeat themselves, technical skills that are critical for the role, and industry specific themes. Remember, there's no right or wrong answer here, but for me these are the ones that I see repeating themselves or crucial for the role website traffic, paid media, SEO/SEM, marketing analytics, and events. The reason this exercise is so crucial is because if you know what the recruiters are looking for you can be who they hire. Now that we've done this together, it's your turn. Press pause and look for those five keywords and themes in your own JD. Once you're done, I'll see you next where we talk about step three.