

Rethinking the Resumé - Skill Clouds - unclek
http://www.crowdspark.com/2008/03/04/rethinking-the-resume-skills-experience/

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henning
I bet this is a good way to get your resume sent straight to the "no hire"
pile.

If I had a big long list of skills and technologies to list, I'd instead
organize them by category (operating system, tool, language, whatever), with a
bold heading and a linebreak for each category. That way you have a chance of
it actually being readable.

Then again I haven't applied for many jobs.

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snorkel
Neat but non-technical HR reps who filter resume piles won't get it.

In general its best to write the resume to match the job description. Rather
than listing all of your skills list only the skills that job requires plus a
few extra closely related.

Listing too many skills can get your resume tossed because the resume reader
will see a lot of Adobe products listed and think you're more of a graphic
designer than a developer. Concentrate on what the job opening asked for.

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mronge
A terrible idea, just like how tag clouds are a terrible idea.

I was talking to some HCI folks recently, and they said that in a study people
thought there browser was broken when they encountered a tag cloud.

Simply does not work.

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Erf
So, Hacker News readers who have hired people based on resumes before: How
would you feel, and what would you think, if you encountered this on an
applicant's resume?

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DarrenStuart
I would wonder what the hell was going and why they were messing around with
font sizes and diffent shades of grey on my black and white print out.

Its a nice concept but in practice it does not work. Props for trying it out.

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bouncingsoul
I think this a pretty manufactured example. Does anyone list their skills as
an randomly ordered, unformatted wall of text?

All that precious formatting gets lost and the meaning changed if it's copied
into a plaintext email (you're back to a randomly ordered list) or printed
(color text becomes light gray).

And how does one maintain that cloud? If you get better at something you have
to increase its type size, alter its color, and probably change others since
items in the cloud are supposed to be sized relative to everything else.

Rather than use a hard to maintain format that you have to explain (is
everyone familiar with cloudmaps?), just use words and say _I'm not so good at
this yet._

Like henning says, the solution is just some simple organization:

    
    
      PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      CSS 
      Javascript 
      Some experience with SQL
      
      SOFTWARE
      Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator
      Basecamp
      Final Cut Studio
      
      OPERATING SYSTEMS
      Mac OS X and Linux
      Some experience with Windows
      
      Etc.

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brent
I would wonder why someone who is a claimed expert (fancy color, large text
and all) in copywriting has an extra 't' in Adobe Audition. :)

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jamescoops
might work at the top or something in addition to breaking stuff down by
category - would help you stand out a bit make it less boring if you've
scanned 50 cvs that day already...

