While playing around with a website this week I had an idea that isn’t creative enough for me to be the first person to think of it but it is a good way to have clients see the effect of their resume and what keywords and ideas are being expressed. It’s a little bit of creative fun so it may appeal to the more creative people not just the analytical. If used correctly it should also engage the job seeker in their job search and therefore, when reviewed with you, teach them what to look for so they build their own ability to manage their job searching in the future.

1. Send them to www.wordle.net
2. Click the big create your own button. It’s hard to miss.
3. Underneath, “Paste a bunch of text”, have them copy and paste in the text from their resume.
4. Click Go!
5. Adjust the design.

It’s pretty self explanatory and the tech savvy won’t need instructions. The results however are fun and easy to review. The program takes out the common words such as “the” and “of” and with the settings you can limit the number of words it uses so you can focus on the most prominent if you wish.

As an example (I was going for clarity so there a are lot more fun and visually interesting formats than this) here is the results from my own “general use” resume:

I’d say for a Learning and Development Manager in the Employment field I have some of the biggest keywords covered, although I probably want to emphasise ‘learning’ a bit more. Also, I don’t see a lot of result oriented words. Perhaps this is because I vary the words used to describe and quantify my achievements, perhaps it’s because I haven’t quantified them enough. I’ll have to go back and review it with this in mind.

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Picture by Wordle (Top 20 words in this post)