Keywords and accomplishments are both important: do not choose one over the other. Your keywords should be woven into your accomplishments and your accomplishments should support your keywords.
If you do not have the right keywords or skills to match the requirements of recruiters or Applicant Tracking Software (ATS), your resume will not be found. If your resume is not found, it will not be read. You can find the keywords you need in each job posting or advertisement and on a company’s website. It is better to work in keywords throughout the resume, rather than concentrating them in the summary. Some ATS programs read summaries; some do not.
You must have accomplishments to validate your knowledge, skills, abilities, and keywords for you to be contacted by the recruiter and/or hiring manager. Accomplishments set you apart from the other candidates whose resumes also contain the right keywords. Accomplishments tell recruiters and managers what you did with your skills, education, and knowledge. Say a large company needs someone who can lead a software engineering team. They have four candidates. The company is more likely to choose the candidate who “led six engineers using agile software development to create a proprietary scheduling application that generated $5 million in revenue from hospitals throughout the United States.” That accomplishment speaks volumes more than “led a software engineering team.”
Check out this article on FoxBusiness for my advice on using keywords and accomplishments to make a resume stand out.
If you have trouble identifying keywords and accomplishments or if you are struggling to weave keywords into your story, please contact Robin’s Resumes®. We can help.