Resume Visualization: What does your resume look like?

my resume, according to Tagxedo

I like to keep my resume up to date. Every time some new task comes along, I'll add that in there somewhere. Then if a new job comes up, I'll just edit out the old stuff, make a quick attempt at removing the irrelevant things, and mail it out. 

So what is my resume saying? 

Well on the advice of my wife I threw my resume into a word cloud generator. There are a few of them, but I picked tagxedo. 

So what does it say about me? Well not a whole lot about the technologies that I use, but a bunch about "management", "product", "design". I suppose that would be great if I were mostly focused on more management. Or if I were a product manager. But I'm probably not.

Now lets look at some of the jobs that I might be interested it.

I just took a stab in the dark: I like kindle, I like enterprise software, so I threw in the first job description from the kindle team that caught my eye. The result: a very different word cloud.

A Kindle SDE Job Description

Now I'm not saying you should lie on your resume: that will always come back to bite you very quickly. But your resume is basically just the sign on the front of a restaurant. I've done a bunch of things, and they'll all be reflected on my resume, but I am clearly spending much more time talking about things I've done that aren't relevant to the jobs I want than I should.

Because I'm in software and everybody needs them I get reasonably good responses when I apply for jobs, but I suspect now, that I'm getting this traction in-spite of my resume, not because of it.

Time to update.