For a job hunter, which matters more: A great photo or the hottest key words?
Pictures on Linked In apparently get a lot of attention, but so does getting the right jargon in. This is because your application, your LinkedIn profile, whatever, is getting analyzed first and foremost by algorithms that match your jargon against the employer’s job listing.
But Bloomberg reports the interesting fact that, like fashion, keeping up with the hot career buzz words (tech jargon) is as hard for employers as it is for prospective candidates. Turns out, if you want to attract talent, you need the right words. A service that analyzes your postings recommends saying good bye to “Big Data” and “Drug-Free Workplace” and hello to “Real-time data” and “Robust and scalable.”
The article elaborates, “Big data: This is the biggest loser in technology job ads, according to Textio, a big data company that will no longer call itself that. Two years ago, everything was about big data, but Snyder noticed that it had started to drop off five or six months ago. Today, engineering jobs that mention “big data” perform 30 percent worse, on average, than those that do not, she said. “Now it’s so saturated that you’d better talk about AI and not big data.”
From a writerly perspective, none of these terms mean anything, and “robust, scalable” are particular offenders. (Please come build some “brittle, petite software application for our boutique client, srsly!”) But if jargon will always be with us, I guess it pays to use this season’s fashion, and perhaps to have a really hot picture of your corporate HQ too!
A Few Reasonable Words 