How Do I Get A Job I Want With A Visual CV?

Learn this easy to apply step by step process to create a compelling visual CV that will help you stand out on the job market

Why visual CVs are so beneficial

First of all, what is a visual CV? A visual CV is a brief visual representation of your skills and experience, your superpowers and your capabilities, that is easy to read and interpret and that creates a strong emotional connection with the audience. A good visual CV is a picture that gives a viewer an almost instantaneous understanding of the essence of you as a professional and personality. A picture worth of thousand words.

And why is it so powerful and why you should concern yourself with being able to create one?

There are reasons why you should:

1. It is unusual and it stands out. Everyone else is using the standard CV where you write up your job experience as a list of job titles and job descriptions. I am not saying you do not need it anymore, but a visual CV can be used to promote yourself on social media and literally get noticed immediately. While the standard one can be brought in the game when you need to comply with the hiring process. A visual CV is a shock tactics weapon.
2. It is brief. A visual CV cannot be too elaborate due to the limitations of the format. This is its weakness and also its strong side at the same time. Being brief means that it will take only a moment for a person to interpret the information and it is appreciated by people who are bathing in a massive amount of information and have only a short span of time to consume yet another piece of information.
3. It will force you to focus on what is important. The format limitations of a visual CV will force you to leave out the details that are less important and therefore must not be visualized. You will have to think about the essence of your narrative and what kind of impression you are trying to make. This way visual CV also becomes a thinking tool to help you polish out your narrative, inevitably increasing the quality of your message.
4. It can be used to improve your conventional CV. Okay, you still think it is silly to use a visual CV (I do not agree, but I can understand your reluctance and anxiety). But think about it — creating your visual CV will help you sort your thoughts out and will make it clearer for you to see how you should build your conventional CV. A method could be — draw your visual CV out and use it as a plan to re-write your regular CV afterward. Win-win!
5. It is fun! You will have a lot of fun creating your visual CV and it will cheer you up! Quite awesome in our stressful time, innit? ;)

It is easy to create one and YOU CAN DO IT

A lot of people not involved in creative jobs, basically everyone except for graphic designers, artists, and architects, can try to use their lack of drawing training as a perfect excuse to stay away from activities that involve drawing. These people would say something like “I cannot draw”, or “I haven’t drawn since the primary school”, or even “I am just incapable of drawing and I do not have the talent” and I have heard those numerous times.

I can tell you this. Yes, you cannot draw the same way as a professional with proper training and years and years of practice behind them. And probably you shouldn’t — you already do something else in your life. And no, you can still draw good enough to express yourself visually. You just need to learn the technique to draw simply or sketch things out. Your main goal here is to create visual objects that can resemble concepts that they represent. On a level good enough for people to quickly interpret them and not bother with the low fidelity of the drawing itself. This level of skill can be achieved relatively quickly. And you will become better over time, putting enough practice behind you.

Now to the point. In order to come up with a visual CV you basically need three components:

1. Draw your portrait — the hardest one among the three. I have created the comprehensive step by step guide for sketching a nice looking portrait that does not require too much of drawing skill. Find it here.
2. Write legibly so other people can read and understand your writing.
3. Learn how to draw a few helpful icons that can be used to represent the concepts often found on CVs. I will provide a set of icons that are most commonly used, feel free to reuse them.

All of the abovementioned things are attainable for everyone, even those who say they cannot draw. The trick here is to slow down, be copycat and not aim at the perfection from the first go; focus on a clear message and not the quality of the drawing.

Now, let’s draw together your visual CV.

The step by step guide for creating a visual CV

First thing first, you will need some materials to create your visual CV. The bare minimum is a few sheets of A4 (letter size if you are in the US) regular copy paper and a black felt tip pen. Additionally to that, you could also use a couple of brush pens in more colors. I usually prefer light grey for shading and bright yellow for highlighting, but extra colors are for gold-plating and are not really necessary. Here is what you need to get going:

Grab an A4 (letter size for the folks in the US) and a black color technical pen or any other felt tip pen, preferably with a fine point. I use a regular printing copy paper and a technical pen by Neuland with a thick tip of 0.7 size. Pay less attention to the tooling though.

Step 1 — Define the major chunks of facts about you and create a layout

If it helps, write down the labels of major chunks of information on small sticky notes and arrange on the paper, like this:

To help break the void of the perfect white in front of you, use the old trick of writing down labels of major sections you need for your layout and place them on the paper. It will give you the flexibility to re-arrange and think more carefully about your information design and layout. And it is easier this way — you will fear less to mess things up!

Think about the most important sections of your visual CV and elaborate on them even further. The fact is, the most important parts must hold the most detail and the least important must be really high-level. This way you will emphasize visually where to look and which parts and pieces should require more attention. In visual perception, there is a law — larger (and the ones with more details) pieces are more important than smaller ones (and the ones will less detail). Make the principle work for you. I am talking about something like this:

I decided that the two most important pieces are the summary and my work experience. I elaborated these two further and generated more sub-chunks, subsequently arranging it on the white of the paper sheet.

This will conclude your preparation. This is a very important step. Make sure you nail your narrative by selecting the most important pieces of information that introduce you the best and that are the most relevant for your audience, for example, for the recruiter who is going to read it.

Step 2 — Choose icons that support your highlights the best

Now that you have a high-level information design for your visual CV, you need to start looking for supportive visuals. I am talking about simple and easy to draw icons that will not become a challenge for your current level of drawing skills. See below to find some examples of icons I often use when I need to tell a visual story about me as a professional or my work experience.

Of course, it is not possible to come up with an ultimate set of icons that would exhaust any need and at some point you will need to come up with more icons. When you run into such a need, check two sources. One, seek inspiration on Google by searching for images that satisfy your criteria. For example, “healthcare icon”. Secondly, you may want to check this fantastic source of endless inspiration at www.thenounproject.com. It has an incredible collection of icons for almost any situation and it is constantly growing.

Try to find the simplest and easiest way to depict a concept with the use of an icon. The good ones are the ones that are not laden with excessive details and are easy for your current level of drawing skills. Here are some examples of icons I often use in relation to the concepts I need for my visual CV.

Step 3 — Transfer the idea onto the paper

Go through your layout iteratively. Start with your portrait. Usually, your audience will lay their eyes on your portrait, so make it relatively big. Follow the instructions from my other article here. It is really simple and only requires certain discipline and persistence:

Start by drawing your portrait. It is not difficult if you diligently follow the simple steps I suggest in my other article.

Then proceed with your name and personal details. It can include your contact information and other details important for your narrative:

Proceed with the name and personal details. Use the icons to help the viewer skim through the information more effectively.

Then knock out the most important section. In my case, it is the summary. Here I decided to pair comprehensive visuals with text labels:

Proceed with the most important chunk of facts. Again, it is a good idea to pair icons with text labels.

Then on with the next section, and so on:

Then I drew out the work experience as a timeline, only focusing on job titles and not so much on the companies where I worked. It can be a combination of though if you need it.

Finally, when all the sections were rendered, the final version looked like this:

The final rendering of the visual CV with all of the sections transferred on paper. It is ready to be used!

A few more examples of layouts I used for my talk on visual thinking at Øredev conference in November, 2019:

As you can see, it is totally fine to stay on the level of simple drawings and only use one color if you are constrained on time and materials. In fact, The drawings you see above have been drawn live during my talk. It was possible to pace the drawing to my talking.

Check my talk here:

Yuri Malishenko — Simplify Complex — the talk on Visual Thinking at Øredev conference, November 8, 2019.

Step 4 — Iterate as many times as it takes to get to the version that you like the most

In fact, you do not need to follow the process with the sticky notes. You can create a draft by just drawing your ideas out on the paper directly and then discarding and doing it again and again.

One thing for sure is that great things do not appear in a single go. Great things are a product of iteration. That said, there is no sense in over-investing in the first version. Make it simple but fast and good enough to learn from it. Recently a friend of mine, Sophie, has engaged in the process of coming up with a visual CV to boost her job search. She came up with the first version and asked for my feedback. Which I did on a sticky note. The process triggered a series of iteration that eventually led to the version Sophie liked the most:

First Sophie came up with a version of the visual CV. Then she asked for my feedback which I provided schematically on a sticky note. Then Sophie started drafting out more iterations.

More iterations entailed as Sophie was looking for a good balance between visuals and text. What usually happens here is that people tend to forget about the text — images are more fun! But it is a vicious trap, the text is still a core part of any visual communication. Keep that in mind too!

Then there were more. Sophie tried to strike a good balance between supporting visuals and text labels. In the end, she came up with the version she liked and felt comfortable sharing publicly.

Your desk might look like this in the end — the creative mess. My favorite type of mess!

Again, it is very important to embrace the fact that your first version will most likely be meh. But that’s ok! How else can you learn and arrive at a better version other than iterating and learning from your mistakes? And do not forget to show it to your friend — it is easy to get blindsided as we are always biased toward our ideas.

Step 5 — OPTIONAL — gold-plate it!

You might want to add an extra touch to your final version by applying shadows and highlighting important parts of your visual CV. I use two brush pens for that:

My regular partners in crime when it comes to goldplating — Neuland FineOne brush pens. My two favorite colors are light grey and brilliant yellow. Grey for popping things out by placing shadows and yellow for highlights and strengthening visual hierarchy.

Once shadows and highlights are applied, the look of the visual CV has changed for better. Supporting visuals are now popping out and the important pieces are easier to find:

When I have time I often use gold-plating techniques to enhance the look and feel of the final drawing. Notice how I used yellow circles to help the viewer distinguish the parts that pertain to my work experience. This way it is easier to differentiate them from the rest of the information present on the CV.

Application and use of visual CV

1 — When updating your regular CV

Let’s say you need to update your regular CV and you haven’t done it in some time, maybe even in years. It might be an intimidating task to do and you would usually feel stuck and would not have a clear understanding of where to start. What you could do in such a case is to start with the visual CV where it would help you focus on the most important parts, finding a good structure for your narrative.

In this example, a friend of mine has created a mind-map type of the visual CV where she started with her in the center and then she continued with different aspects of her to figure out what would be important for her CV later on, where to emphasize:

A friend of mine used this mind-map visual CV to help herself collect the most important facts about herself as a professional. It also turned out to be a very well structured visual summary. The text is in Danish.

2 — When promoting yourself on social media

Antons Osadcijs was looking for the non-standard ways to attract attention to his candidacy applying for a job at one of the biggest companies in Denmark. He decided to produce some hi-quality content on social media and published this post that did attract the attention of the company’s employees as you can see from the comments to his post on Linkedin:

Antons has posted his ideas about his approach to his daily job with the intention to attract the attention of people in the company he would like to work. He did get some attention from the people at that company and they even started tagging each other there to spread the word, proving the approach does work!

This is how Antons has told his story with his visual CV:

As you can see, Antons has chosen the map of Denmark to tell his story. He draws diagrams digitally.

3 — When presenting yourself to a new team

Let’s say you are joining a new team and there is no better way to present yourself other than creating a visual summary of your strong sides and your expertise. Last year we were forming a new team and we have decided to create a brief poster to do the presentations. You can be very flexible what you put on those posters and in our case, we agreed to focus on four areas:

• Experience.
• The preferred style of communication.
• Strong traits.
• Hobbies.

Also, we used those not so sustainable easy flips (rolls of plastic films that are claimed to be easy to wipe off; they are also static and would stick to almost any flat surface, you can write with whiteboard markers on them) as a medium for our posters. See how it looked like during the presentation:

My dear friend and colleague Jakob Wolman is presenting how cool he is. In the earlier version of his presentation (to the right) he used the concept of frames and containers to help the viewer differentiate between chunks of information.

This is what I drew when I was in a similar situation:

When I needed to present myself visually I have chosen to focus on two things: a) my skills and b) my ambitions. As you can see, I still had my self-portrait and I used a lot of icons to make the message easier to read and encourage the viewer to engage with it.

4 — As an ice-breaker for team building activities

Sometimes you would like to spice up your team building event. Sharing stories about yourself the visual way is one of the most powerful ways to express yourself. When we recently gathered for a half a day to learn more about each other in the newly formed team, we have set aside 1 hour for telling stories about ourselves. Since the team name was decided to be Wookiees we thought it would also be fun to draw ourselves as a wookiee. (For those who do not know what I am talking about, a wookiee is a fictional species from the Star Wars saga, read more about wookiees if you are interested).

This is what I did to present myself from that angle:

I used the fictional character to represent myself in this one and I chose the wookiee who likes to draw. It was super fun!

An interesting thing happened. At the time of me drawing the Wookiee, the other two team members started copying. They created two cute versions of a wookiee and could use it for their presentation posters. People are very good at being copycats and that is super fine. Don’t be afraid to copy, copying is a great way of learning. Steal with pride, steal like an artist!

My poster has encouraged two cute versions of a wookiee used by my colleagues. We had a lot of laughs and in general, the exercise filled our team-building exercise with meaning and joy.

So what happens next?

I implore you to pick up your pen and put your story to the paper. Follow the step by step guides from above and tell the world about you, what a great personality and professional you are! Share it with a hash-tag of #visualcv or #myvisualcv so people could find it easier on social media. I can’t wait to see and read those stories!

If you are stuck with the question analog of physical well then it doesn’t really matter. Don’t let the perfection stand in the way of accomplishing. Do it the way you are most comfortable and share it with the rest. And have fun!

I am an aspiring product manager, agile coach and a visual thinker living in Copenhagen, Denmark. I blog on visual thinking and share my random agile thoughts, if you want to read more. You can get in touch with me via my website or Instagram account or on Twitter. All the best!