Preface

By no means do I claim have an impressive résumé, but I did want to share a trick I thought of to help me improve it. Unfortunately, like most ideas that I come up with on my own that I think are original, doing a few Google searches proves me wrong. Regardless, the following helped me:

Word Clouds

I wrote a while back about generating a word cloud for my blog (which I need to do again!), because I think wordclouds (and data visualization in general) are cool. They simply count all words in a given text, and display the words with different size fonts according to how often the word appears.

Resume Enhancement

I discovered that wordclouds can also be used to improve your resume. Since space is a premium in a resume, word choice and sentence structure is key. Using a word cloud to visualize the content in your resume can help guide your choice of words. There are many free sites to do this, the most popular is wordle (though I used IBM Word Cloud Generator).

The Experiment

Here are the before and after visualizations of my resume (as of Jun 12, 2014):

The differences are mostly subtle, but I did manage to effectively highlight certain keywords better. Though I’m not 100% satisfied yet, I feel the second version looks much better.

Give it a try for yourself!

 

Update (as of 7/10/14): My Linkedin profile visualization

 

Update (as of 12/26/2017): my resumé visualization