Word Clouds for Resumes and Cover Letters

Word choice can make or break a resume or cover letter. By choosing certain words, we direct the flow of our job search documents. However, word count and other analysis tools are not impactful, since people do not understand statistics well and do not really relate to math as well as we do to visual images.

Enter “word clouds” and Wordle. A word cloud is a proportional graphic display, where each word's size represents its frequency in a document. Wordle is a free web page (http://www.wordle.net) which makes a word cloud in moments from any text pasted into the page. See image below of this blogs word cloud!

The value of this exercise is two fold:
(1) certain words jump out at you. These are the most common words. This means you can determine at a glance what you are saying most often & decide if you like what you see.

(2) you can search for words you think ought to be important & see how often you are (not) saying them.

It's 100% free, and takes a few moments.