It’s been a while now since I’ve done the whole sending around the resumé thing, but I was talking over the weekend with a friend recently went in search of a new job. The resumé’s been around for a while now with relatively few changes to reflect the integrated skill sets of today’s employees (e.g. contacts and resources available through informal social networks) . Over the next week or so we’ll be taking a look at the Resumé (or CV) from some different perspectives. First up? The Skills and Experience Section.

Resumé Skills and Experience Section

The problem with the skills and knowledge section you tend to find in the run-of the-mill (often chronological) resumé, is that its ever increasingly difficult to list your qualifications without leaving out some skills or experience that might be relevant to the job. Add to this the fact that the section is completely flat, and conveys no weight as to how strong you are in each of those skills or how much experience you have in a particular area and beyond including basic skills or keywords, the section borders on useless. To make things more intuitive the skills or attributes are displayed in a manner very similar to that of a tag cloud. The benefits here are two-fold:

1. Employers using keyword scanning software to prioritize matches (do many companies actually still do this?) are given access to a rich variety of keywords.
2. The employer can see at a glance which of your skills are your strongest, as well as being much easier to read.

For example, let’s look at a Skills Section from a Gregory, a fictional Marketing Coordinator:

Pretty boring, right? What is Gregory’s strongest skills? Is it ordered by skill strength? Weakest first?

Now let’s drop Gregory’s skills into a skill-cloud:

It’s now a lot easier to tell what Gregory’s strengths are and for him to standout with those particular skills over competing applicants. Speaking of standing out, be sure to check out Montreal’s own StandoutJobs who I think are really onto something in terms of improving the recruiting process. If you’re looking for a job make sure to check out some the companies using their platform. I really enjoyed the Freshbooks recruitment video.

Also, if you’re looking for a simple way to generate a tag cloud based on your experience for your own resumé or CV, tocloud.com has an easy to use tool to get you started.

In our next “Rethinking the Resumé” segment we’ll look at some alternative approaches to cover letters. Stay tuned!

Update 1: Thanks to the Hacker News commentors that pointed out some typos - it was getting late by the time I put the sample together. Also, to respond to a couple people, one typically wouldn’t want to group together all their skills like this randomly, but rather group them under sub-headings - be it Software, Hardware, Operating  Systems, etc, where they could still be weighted.

Update 2: On managing this beast, that could quickly become problematic. I would envision a tool that saved your skills and weights, where you could go back to easily modify them and selectively generate clouds tailored specifically to each job you apply for.