Will Knott

If I have the timing right, this will be uploaded while I’m at an interview, so it seems timely.

My CV as a tag cloud…

Robin Blandord came up with the idea to run his CV through Wordle.net to see what it would look like as a tag cloud. It’s been repeated by Ellybabes, Sinéad Cochrane and Paul Browne. Sorry that it’s in simple black & white and not visually pleasing as the others; I thought about adding it to my physical CV or embed it in the files to see if there was a change in uptake. Given that most (if not all) recruitment agencies parse the résumés they recieve through something similar, it might make sense. Wordle is a Java application which parses text, ignores common words, and creates a tag cloud. The size of the word is proportional to the how often it occurs in the CV.

Putting something like a résumé through it might take a bit of tweaking. Plurals are (currently) counted separately, and other common phrases show up. I needed to tweak my CV to stop my address showing up in the tag cloud for instance.

The other thing is how “management” looms large over both “software” and “database” (with “sql” peeking in there). I didn’t expect that, nor expect to see something similar on the other technical people’s clouds.

Does it give an accurate picture which should be used as a reflection or consideration for employment, or is it really easy to “game” the results to create an artificial profile?

And given the full social media treatment, does a tag cloud of a persons delicious account cast a different reflection than their résumé?

So then,
You hiring?

take care,
Will Knott

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Would you call around to someone’s house and work there? Think of it as a book club for mobile workers. That Mulley Man brought up something interesting in his Fluffy Links (TM or it should be by now), namely Jelly.

Jelly is casual co-working. The site arranges invitations for people to work from a member’s home for the day. The organisers provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of. All the benefits of co-working with fewer facilities? Well it would be nice, but I’m trying not to imagine an open coffee session at someone’s house. But I like the idea.

As for the video below, well I thought about work and recently came across Freemasons Remix of “Work” by Kelly Rowland. Well it fits the subject, but I don’t think I could use a laptop where the video was shot; I’d be dancing. And I’m a bad dancer.

take care,
Will