There’s a cool little tool that a lot of blog and website owners use. They use it to tell visitors about their site. In a visual sort of way.
Commonly called a “cloud”.
In fact, I have a “keyword cloud” here on the blog that tells you a little bit about my content (see bottom right). But to be even more specific, I used a word cloud tool at Wordle. I added my url to the site and it gave me back this cloud:
So this word cloud is like a visual summary. The larger the word, the more I use it on the site. So, in some ways, you can use it to keep yourself honest. If I say my site is supposed to be about “ideas for job search, career and life” then how am I doing?
Well, I see that “job, search, career, resume” are really big. And that’s good. But you really have to work hard to find “ideas” (there’s your Where’s Waldo project). The one word I could not find was “life”. Unless I misspelled it as “list” or “like” a few times. But I don’t think so.
Overall it appears I’m doing a pretty good job of staying on topic. What do you think?
But now I want to focus on your resume. Because just like this blog, your resume should have a communication objective. Ideas you need to get across to create the right impression.
How are you doing?
If I were you, I’d go to Wordle. On their home page, click “Create Your Own” to get started. And then copy/paste your entire resume into their form and hit “go”. Here’s what I got from my 2007 resume (I was looking for a Director or VP Marketing job (product/brand management):
So here you can see that my main messages were about “marketing, brand, products, new, division, growth”. All pretty good, I think. Of course some of these keywords will come straight from your past job titles, but you can beef them up nicely with a well written positioning statement and a strong, concise career summary. And if your resume history is not perfectly in line with the job you are applying for, those words matter even more, right?
You can also paste in text from your one page networking bio or your cover letter to create additional clouds. Just to see what message you are sending with your word choices. And keep your documents on track and integrated.
Now it is your turn. Go give it a try. And let me know what you find out.
What messages are you sending?
Also: See another cool use of Wordle shared by @dsnestle on his Posterous page. Twitter Backgrounds And Personal Branding Using #Wordle.
