JOB SEARCH LINKS

Laid Off and Looking
The Wall Street Journal is following eight out-of-work MBA's as they search for jobs in a post-meltdown world.

Jibber-Jobber Blog
What is Jibber Jobber? The site isn't even exactly sure. Here's how they describe themselves: "Is it a job search tool? Is it a networking tool? It is more like a personal relationship manager that allows you to do everything you need to do to manage a job search and optimize your network relationships - for the duration of your career!" Whatever it is, the blog is pretty interesting.

Great discussion going on right now on the JibberJobber blog regarding the Ladders and their approach to resume reviews and writing. Click on the link above and go to May 28's entry on The Ladders Scam. It's fascinating.

What is your resume really saying? Find out with a Resume Word Cloud.
For those looking for work or who keep their resumes updated on a regular basis: Recruiters do not read resumes, they scan them. It's been said that a recruiter spends less than 30 seconds looking at each resume before they reach a conclusion. Recruiters are also actively looking for reasons to reject your resume. Resumes are not, however, written for scanning. They are written to convey a complex summary of what value you offer. Here's a pretty cool thing you can do right now to see what your resume is saying: Create a Resume Word Cloud.

Here's how.

1. Open your resume.

2. In your resume, select and copy all the text. Do a Select All (Apple-A or Control-A depending on your computer), then Copy (Apple-C or Control-C).

3. Go to Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/create and click in the box under the words "Paste in a Bunch of Text"

4. Click the Go button under this text box. Wordle will chug for a second or two and return you with a work of art: Your Resume as a Word Cloud! Wordle will remove common words like "and, the, or, etc."

5. You can right-click on a word to remove words you don't want to appear. For example, I don't need "Peter" showing up so I can remove that. You can also customize the colors, orientation, etc. One downside is that it doesn't take into consideration phrases.

I'm not clear on the fascination people seem to have with posting and sharing these with others, but it does give you a quick view of the words that repeat throughout and offers an opportunity to go in and make subtle revisions that bring out your core themes. For example, I found that "despite" is a pretty common word in my resume and that I need to bring out "negotiations" a bit more aggressively.

You can also see other people's Resume Word Clouds on the Better Jobs Faster Flickr group at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1093627@N24/

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