The way to do this would be to use the flight as a targeted sample for snack products. By providing free snacks on an otherwise snack-less flight the snack company gets exclusive access to a specific passenger feedback either by completing cards before exiting the aircraft or by going online post-flight and completing a survey for a chance to win a prize. On an even more recent flight with Porter Airlines, Terra Chips were offered as a snack option, and I upon landing tried three different grocery stores before finally securing a bag. They were that good. What do you think? Is in-flight try-vertising a viable solution for airlines intent on cutting costs? Let me know in the comments.

As a somewhat related aside, here’s a clip from Mad TV on budget airlines…

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.

Then it came to me. Themed booster seats! You could tie it to your restaurant’s theme, or go generic with an assortment of different available booster seats. Some of the ones we came up with included:

• Jet Pilot Booster Seat, complete with yoke and seatbelt.
• Firetruck Booster Seat
• Police Car Booster Seat
• Spaceship, Tractor, and Racecar, and my favourite,
• the Garbage Truck Booster Seat*

What kid wouldn’t love to eat their “dippy eggs” and “toast soldiers” in the cockpit of a fighter jet, or the front seat of a police car?

If you’re focusing on the little things to enhance your overall experience, don’t forget the the experience of the little ones’ well.

As an aside, if you do get the chance to grab breakfast at one of the many Chez Cora’s restaurants across Canada (and soon in the US), its definitely worth it. The fresh-themed menu is delicious and the food presentation is fantastic. You even get a fresh piece of fudge on the way out. Who doesn’t love fudge?!

*this is for anyone who ever wanted to be a garbage truck driver when they were a kid. There must be a mystical quality about the garbage truck driver, as a surprising number of people I talked to can remember wanting to be a “garbage man” when they grew up.