How to perfect your resume using word clouds
You hear over and over how important it is to tailor your resume to the job you’re applying for, and I agree with that, but we don’t often talk about HOW to compare your resume to the job description, and how to ensure they’re well matched. One technique for doing this is to use something called Word Clouds.
What are word clouds? Word clouds takes words and phrases from a body of text and make the most frequent ones appear larger and bolder. They look something like this:
So, how do you make this work for your resume? In short, you take the job description, copy that text and plug it into a site like https://www.wordclouds.com/ and enter the job description and run the word cloud, then input your resume and see how they compare.
Example 1: let’s start by looking at a job I would NOT be a good fit for: a welder.
Job description cloud is on the left, my resume is on the right:
Look at the two word clouds. What jumps out at you? For the welding one, you’ll notice that it stresses aerospace industry, weld or wleding, manufacturing, etc. – in other words, none of the things I’ve done in the past. Looking at the word cloud for my resume, you’ll see product, various words around management, implementations, SaaS, and other software and account / customer management related terms.
Now, let’s look at another example.
Example 2: Product manager at Amazon (way more in line with some of my past experience)
Now, look at the job description for a product manager role at Amazon (software) and compare that to my resume, which was NOT tailored for the role and which could still be cleaned up a bit. Notice that there are more similarities? You’ll note we both talk about product, management / leadership, delivering and launching, etc. This is a much better fit, and this is with a resume of mine that, again, is
- NOT tailored to this job description
- mentions my past roles in customer success (account management) and in product management, while the Amazon role is strictly product management.
If I took the time to accommodate the above two points, I could make it match even better, but I think you get the point.
A few tips to help with this:
- Remove section headers from the description and your resume
- Also remove dates and locations for your jobs, education, etc.
- All of those details are extraneous and will muddy your word cloud, giving results that aren’t helpful and aren’t a true comparison
tl;dr: doing an exercise like this with your resume will help you see how well you line up with the job descroption, and what items you stress on a high level compared to what they are looking for