Word cloud made with WordItOut
What is a word cloud? Look at the image above. That is a word cloud. It is a visual summary of the words used in this blog. The larger the word, the more often it’s used in a body of text. It’s easy to do and can be used for your job search.
You have heard that keywords are essential to job search. You know they are in the job posting and should be in your résumé. But how do you find them? You create a word cloud. When you create a word cloud from a job posting, you see they key words. They are largest words. As a word gets smaller, so does its importance in the ad.
The largest words should be in your résumé. They are the words that have been programmed into the application tracking system used by the human resource department. The word cloud from your résumé is should be similar to the word cloud of the job posting.
Word clouds will also help you in an interview. By creating a word cloud from the company’s website homepage, you will see what’s important to them. These are the words you are going to be sure to use during the interview. To get a better idea of the company, use more than just the home page.
Your LinkedIn profile can benefit from a word cloud. If you don’t have a particular job posting in mind, you can do a search for a number of job postings for the type of job you want. Create a word cloud from the postings and use the largest words in your profile. They are the keywords that employers are using to fill spots in their company. Instead of having an ad for an open position, they might be trying to fill the position by doing a search on LinkedIn.
These four websites contain a word cloud generator. All four are easy and give some output options. If you are using your word cloud to search for key words, you won’t need the interesting output styles. The default cloud will be sufficient. The web sites are Worditout, Wordle, ToCloud, and WordSift.
How to create a word cloud:
If you can copy and paste, you can create a word cloud.
1—highlight the text you want to use for your word cloud and copy it.
2—paste the text into the space provided by the word cloud generator site and click the button that starts the process.
And there you have it. Key words are an indispensable part of your job search. But you must know how to find them if you are going to use them to your advantage.
Arleen, love this exercise in defining your keywords. My kids use Wordle at school to summarize a story they’ve heard. I’m going to give it a try for LinkedIn and blog posting.