Amy Jo Kim has put together a fantastic slideshare about metagame design.
If you work with social media, online commuities or anything where you’re bringing people together, do an exercise & think about your space in terms of points, feedback/rewards & viral (all described in the deck). You don’t need to be building a game to apply these principals.
A few weeks ago I saw someone using Wordle on their resume website & thought what a cool idea! I didn’t realise just how much of an interesting experiement this would be. Turns out it’s a great way to see what the resume is really communicating (and a different way of communicating your resume).
I can work in 2 countries. One country prefers short 1-2 page resumes and the other is happy with longer (mine is 4 pages). My 4 pager includes highlights, a summary, goal and a job by job listing of responsibilities & achievements. My 2 pager is focused on overall skills & achievements with a just a list of where I’ve worked.
First I ran the longer Aussie resume (see below). It definitely communicates that I’m into product (management) and communities (as in Online Community & Social Media) and revenue (as in improving products so they have revenue). Seems I also use the word ‘including’ a lot 
Then I ran the shorter skills focused USA resume. Community & revenue have completely dropped off! Experience, business & sales have grown in size.
The resumes are slightly different snapshots so here I’ve brought them both together:
Product now dominates (makes sense!) and there’s a broader picture of me with more evenly weighted words like community, team, business, managed, sales, revenue, support.
So what am I doing with this insight? Will I be changing my resumes? Probably not.
The biggest shock for me was the disappearance of the word ‘community’ in the USA resume. I’ve done product management for several online communities & it’s a differenciator in the market. But it can also be a deterient as multiple recruiters have said ‘Why are you interested in this job? There’s no community aspect’ and then didn’t seem to understand/care that I have experience in other areas (content, search, tools, etc) as well. That’s why I’ll leave it alone for the moment.
What does your resume communicate in a tag cloud?
*FYI, I removed product names & company names before putting the text into Wordle.