Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

When your love-career quests face stiff competition, optimizing them with keywords is often the Viagra that stimulates success.

That’s because life has become a ginormous filter through which we make decisions.

Employers use keyword filters to screen for the right job candidates. Online dating sites use them to pigeon hole members into likes and dislikes. Search engines use them to let the cream of search results float to the top.

We live in a digitized world, and it puts others in charge of making decisions about the course of our life, whether we like it or not. It seems like you need to optimize—the buzzword of this decade—everything.

While we want more control over the bits and bytes that describe us in our quests for love and a good job, we often face restrictions that are more difficult to circumvent than a barbed-wire fence.

Online dating profiles and their pull-down menus and the check boxes you’re forced to tick are a perfect example of this.

On Match, you’re forced to describe your appearance as a few extra pounds, big and beautiful, curvy or full-figured, among a few other superlatives. Fitness Singles, another dating site, offers average, above average, stunning, and you decide as some of the choices you can choose from to describe yourself. If you don’t like any of these choices, too bad—you won’t be able to click through to the next screen to finish your profile.

Your user name can also relegate you to search engine sludge. You need to feather your identity in the same way that a momma bird feathers her nest. It needs to include the right keywords so someone will pluck you. So, if you’re harry101, you’ll be in terminal incubation mode and miss out on that pulsating “New Messages” icon in your inbox.

Your resume’s effectiveness also depends on its keyword health.  Increasingly, big and small companies rely on keyword-searchable databases to find candidates to fill job vacancies. One expert estimates that 80 percent of resumes are searched for job-specific keywords.

The skivvy: Encode your resume with these keywords, which you can find in ads. While it’s still important to emphasize action words (verbs), nouns are gaining equal importance. The experts say to find three to 20 ads for the same position at different companies and highlight words that appear early and frequently. Assure Consulting offers a list of keywords to jazz up your resume.

Supposedly, if your resume fails to include more than 50 percent of keywords found in job ads you’ve targeted, your chances of getting an interview are as slim as finding your match-mate.