If you are looking for your next job in Renewable energy then having discovered RenewablesCareers you are in the right place, and you have taken the first step towards that new career.

Putting your CV / Resume on an online job board is one of the most effective ways to find a new job, with ever increasing numbers of jobs being advertised online, and declining numbers appearing in traditional printed media, the savvy job seeker knows that online job boards are the place to be.

There are two main ways you can use these boards, by registering your CV / Resume on the job board, which should always be free, and the other is to register for job alerts, again a free service on RenewablesCareers where emails will be sent out to you each time a job is posted by a recruiter looking for someone just like you, these job alerts are selected according to your own criteria.

I’m going to give you a bit of inside advice from a recruiters perspective about how to get your CV / Resume to appear at the top of that hiring managers search.  This information will help you get selected from the database, ahead of your competition by prospective employers looking for skills just like yours.

The key is to first put yourself in the position of the hiring manager.  Recruiters and hiring managers subscribe to online job boards and pay a fee to have access to the database of suitable job seeking candidates.  When these recruiters search a CV / Resume database looking for their next employee they will first identify the key skills and experience for their job, then they will use these keywords to search the database for their ideal candidate.  I liken this to a google search for a new car, I wouldn’t type into my search engine “Car with wheel at each corner”, I would most likely type in the model, year, colour, engine size, fuel and possibly geographical location.

Let’s imagine our imaginary recruiter works for a tidal power company looking for High Voltage Electrical Designers with experience of Subsea Installation; the recruiter is likely to use specific key phrases relating to the role in their database search.  Make sure that you have included all the key words related to your experience and key skills in your CV / Resume, and if there is more than one way of describing your skills, then use all of the variations.  For example, to appear high in the list of results for this position you might have used words such as HV and High Voltage, subsea and marine, tidal and ocean, hydro, power, energy and electrical, design and engineering, AutoCAD or ETAP, and any other electrical engineering design software you have used.  Terms like commissioning or installation, project management or engineering, FEED and specification are the kind of terms that will be used to find you, so if they relate to you, include them in your CV / Resume.

There is often key experience that a hiring manager is looking for in his ideal candidate, these will be also be keywords to narrow a search for an ideal candidate.  So if you have experience of specific aspects of engineering equipment, for instance Umbilicals or SEPDIS (Subsea Electrical Power Distribution systems), or control systems such as Siemens, S7, Rockwell or Allen Bradley, these terms should appear in your CV / Resume, they really can bring your CV / Resume to the top of the search results.

Have another critical look at your CV / Resume, while the contents of your CV / Resume should cover your skills, experience, qualifications and achievements, the actual words you use in your CV / Resume will make the difference between being found at the top of database search results, or left at the bottom of the pool.   The lesson here being, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!

Now go ahead, register online, upload your CV / Resume and don’t forget to add your contact details!