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KeyWords to Nail Your Job Interview, by Wendy S. Enelow, has all the hallmarks of an effective resource, when planning not only job interviews but also resumes and cover letters. If used in an intelligent and discriminating way, I believe this book can be of great help to anyone searching for the right words to choose, in order to maximise his or her chances when applying for a job.

This is a fairly slim book, weighing in at less than 200 pages, yet has a surprising amount of substance to it. However, it's certainly not the sort of volume you would read from cover to cover, due to the way it is organised. Written by career coach and publishing phenomenon Wendy S. Enelow, this book has a few chapters devoted to explaining key words (or "KeyWords", as it is written throughout) plus "action verbs" and "high-impact phrases", and it has a greater number of chapters focussing on 16 different industries and professions, from finance to engineering, and from banking to the law; you therefore do not need to plough through every single chapter, but can simply go straight to the section most relevant to your needs.

KeyWords to Nail Your Job Interview is, basically, a book best used as a toolbox, to be opened when the situation requires and from which the most appropriate tool can be selected for a specific task.

If this book has an overall message, it is that during the job application process, the choice of words you use is crucial, and can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. There are several ways in which your choice of vocabulary can work either for or against you.

Firstly, we live in an age of automation, when electronic copies of resumes have become the norm. In the old days, a human being would be the first entity to read and assess your job application - nowadays, it is often a computer program which can scan the soft copy of your text and search for industry-specific words and phrases. In a banking context, for example, these might include "foreign exchange", "deposits" or "investment management". Without these "KeyWords", your application might fall at the first hurdle, rejected, in effect, by a robot.

Secondly, if your application makes it to the interview stage, the person sitting opposite you will also be listening for certain words and phrases. In the world of health care, you might have to talk about "health care delivery systems", in engineering it might be "prototype development" or "product lifecycle management". Each field of human expertise

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