I heard there were applications one could use to develop word clouds of your key words. After search for several hours and looking at several software applications, I couldn't find one that gave me the ROI for the time spent, cost and benefit. Maybe someone can help me? So instead of getting a cloud of key words that showed greatest repitition, the tool provided a cloud of non essential words after I imported 3 job announcements, I decided to do the following which we should all do. If you need to use a word cloud software that is most recommended, try Wordle.net (it's free; if you like it, let me know)
For your resume submission, look at the key words in the job announcement and try as best as possible to reflect these key searchable words into your text. You don't need to change your summary of jobs and results statements only your 9-12 key words, skills, or as I'm now calling mine: Value Propositions. I also liked the suggestion that your me in 30 seconds or tagline should be one line long and at the top of your resume under your contact information. After that you can add your "me in 30". I welcome suggestions on your tag lines. Under the tagline and "me in 30", I include my bullets of key skills (keywords from the announcement that reflects your talents).Each person can develop their own tagline.
Mine says:
"Engaging people and processes to maximize value".
I will now reflect my key accomplishments and 30-60-90-day report to reflect how I've maximized shareholder, customer, performance, stakeholder, or other ROI value. From my HR/Operations Management experience, I can show prospective clients or employers how I can add value for them.
Wikepedia defines word cloud as:
A Word Cloud is a visual representation of some text as a bunch of words based on a weight associated to each word. Typically, the frequency (keyword density) of the words in the page is used as the weight even though some other metric might be used. ToCloud is an online free word cloud generator that uses word frequency as the weight. Hence, the generated word cloud of a page gives a quick understanding of how the page is optimized for certain words. ToCloud is also smart enough to extract phrases and works much better than most other word cloud generators on the web. The word cloud of a blog, news page, feed will give a quick idea about what topics are being discussed.
Tag clouds are popular in the web 2.0 world. If you have a blog or an account with social networking websites, you can use ToCloud and display a word cloud of your pages and impress your friends and visitors. If you are a SEO specialist, you can use this tool to get better insight into your customers' web pages
Other suggestions for your LinkedIn profile: Since you cannot change your linkedin profile everytime you fill out an application, you have to decide how best to reflect your keywords in your profile. The best way is to do a search on Indeed for 3-5 key job announcements for positions you're hoping to land. You then do your own manual job cloud optimization getting those key words, skills and certificates that they require and where appropriate to you, insert them into your profile. To do a sanity check, look up people who have 300+ connections in your field/job level who have maximized their own key word clouds. I've seen some who just insert a paragraph called "keywords" into their summary section. Rather than name them keywords, include them as bullets in your LI profile (skills or value propositions).
Another suggestion was to take these keywords and insert them into a hidden box on your resume with white (invisible) lettering. David Clay indicated that the applicant tracking systems are now picking up these kind of ruses to trick the computer. I have to believe this is correct or I would see a lot more people trying to optimize their resume getting screened in by hidden key words. If you know the key words, include them where appropriate in your resume.
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