Recruiters do not read resumes, they scan them. It's been said that a recruiter spends less than 30 seconds looking at each resume before they reach a conclusion. Recruiters are also actively looking for reasons to reject your resume. Resumes are not, however, written for scanning. They are written to convey a complex summary of what value you offer.  Here's a way cool thing you can do right now to see what your resume is saying:  Create a Resume Word Cloud. 

Here's how.

1.  Open your resume.  Here's mine.

2.  In your resume, select and copy all the text.  Do a Select All (Apple-A or Control-A depending on your computer), then Copy (Apple-C or Control-C).

3.  Go to Wordle:  http://www.wordle.net/create and click in the box under the words "Paste in a Bunch of Text"

4.  Click the Go button under this text box.  Wordle will chug for a second or two and return you with a work of art:  Your Resume as a Word Cloud!  Wordle will remove common words like "and, the, or, etc."  Here's a word cloud for my resume:

5.  You can right-click on a word to remove words you don't want to appear.  For example, I don't need "Dan" showing up so I can remove that.    You can also customize the colors, orientation, etc.  One down-side is that it doesn't take into consideration phrases.

I'd like to ask you to post your word cloud on my site for job seekers: www.betterjobsfaster.org.  I'm interested in testing the power of online social networking, so please forward this to as many job seekers as you can so we can amass a resume word cloud quilt!

To make an image of your resume word cloud:

Take a screen shot of your resume word cloud:

PC Instructions:  Why do PC's make things so difficult?

Mac Instructions:  Command+Shift+4 -  Capture dragged area and save as a file.

Join the Flickr Better Jobs Faster Resume Word Cloud Group and share your resume cloud online.

You can also add your Resume Word Cloud here by replying to this message, clicking on the image icon, and uploading your Resume Word Cloud to the Resume Word Cloud Image folder on Better jobs Faster.

Look forward to seeing your resume cloud!

Best wishes,

Dan.