Word clouds - Start using them to decipher job descriptions and improve your resume

TheFORCE

So I've been working with a lot of data recently to show KPI's and KRI's and using graphs, charts etc to create my dashboards. So while I was doing this I did some research on word clouds. They didn't exactly meet my use case for what I'm doing but then I thought, why not use this method on a resume or job description?

So I did just that and the results where pretty good visually. If you are not familiar with word clouds, in a nutshell they are used to find the words that are mentioned with the highest frequency or repetition in a text document, paragraph etc.

Knowing that information you can use the method to improve your resume by creating a word cloud to visualize your area of expertise or the area where you are lacking or construct your resume in a way to showcase your skills.

The same can be applied for the various job descriptions, do a word cloud of it and quickly find what they are looking, what skills the job description is targeting so you can quickly see how to build your resume for that particular job description.

Below are some example.
The first word cloud is from the job description of a healthcare company that is looking for a CISO.
The 2nd one is from the job description of the Elastic company looking for CISO.
The 3rd one is a word cloud of my current resume.
the 4th one is from the job description of my current job.

As you can see, a lot of the skills that are part of the job description on my current job were already the focus on my resume to some degree.
Play around with this method and I bet you will uncover something about your resume you were not expecting.

Note: I used a very simple and basic word cloud add-on from Google Docs, there are other word cloud apps out there that have a lot more options and settings but you can start with Google Docs, just search for the add-on in google Docs. Word 2016 has the same functionality, just turn on Developer mode and import the add-on.

PocketLumberjack

This is how I cleaned up and focused my LinkedIn. I also run job postings through a word cloud to talor my resume a cover letter. It has not been fruitful yet, but I can see how it helps.

yoba222

This is a really cool idea.

I'm wondering what to use as a baseline wordlist though. First thought is the job ad, but some job postings are atrocious, having things like CCNA CCIE OSCP MSCE TCP/IP MCP Network+ A+ in the subject line.

I guess it's sort of a "build the list yourself in a text file and see how it comes out" kind of thing.