What's the Real Message of Your Resume?

An effective resume delivers a clear, unified message about your skills and abilities. But how can you be sure what take-away message your resume really conveys?

Here’s a fun way to test the key word balance of your resume. Paste your resume into Wordle and it’ll create a Word Cloud that visually portrays which words appear most frequently--the more often a word appears in your resume, the bigger it is in your Word Cloud.

Here’s a Word Cloud from a highly successful Operations Manager. Despite this job seeker’s solid career accomplishments, her resume used the resume-killing phrase “Responsible for” numerous times. In addition, soft skills like communication, coaching, and mentoring were given too much emphasis. If this client were seeking a training job, those key words would be appropriate. But in this case, they distract from her more relevant and compelling accomplishments in cost savings and marketing.



The key words from this Word Cloud give a much stronger impression of this Business Development professional. A quick glance gives a pretty accurate impression of this job seeker’s career goals and track record.


If you need help creating a resume that sends a strong message, contact RedRocketResume today.