Actively design your resume
Throughout my career I’ve been involved in the process of recruiting and interviewing, and I’ve seen my share of good resumes as well as some not-so-good ones.
As designers, things we produce are always under the lens of a design microscope. Our resume is no exception. Its presentation is as important, if not more so, as the content.
A well designed resume gives you a power boost in this hotly contested job market, and it might be the difference between whether you get that phone call or not.
First impression goes a long way
When I receive an application through the company’s job portal, one of the first touch points I see is an applicant’s resume. To be precise, most of the time it’s just a miniature version of it — a preview, but this preview creates a lasting first impression, which I have found to be a reliable indicator of what I’ll be seeing next. Most of the time, I already know what the fate of this application’s going to be within that first few milliseconds of seeing it.
Take the following two resume previews as example (the image is intentionally blurred for the protection of the innocents), which of these two designers have just created a more favorable impression on you? And why?
Like you have just done, our evaluation starts the moment we lay our eyes on these resumes. We designers just can’t help it.
At a semi-conscious level, we study a resume’s layout, color composition, typography, the use of negative space (or the lack thereof), etc, etc, and we are already assessing the applicant’s skill before we parse their words.
Resumes with misalignment, questionable color choices, bad typography, or weak structure can ruin an applicant’s chance before it begins. A poorly designed resume tells us one of two things:
- the designer has poor design skill, or
- the designer doesn’t care about the job enough to put any design thoughts into the resume, and is just “spray-and-praying”
Neither of them is the impression you want to leave the hiring team.
Bad presentation is like that coffee stain on a clean shirt, it’s so loud that it pretty much blocks anything interesting that the applicant has to say. At this point, I am already thinking that this isn’t going anywhere, and opening the resume is often just a formality to validate this intuition.
Good design is thoughtful and good designers have thoughtful resume. This thoughtfulness permeates throughout the resume, from the presentation to the writing.
In a future post (link added from the future me) I will talk about the importance of the latter and how one should go about designing the content. In the mean time, check our Lori Bumgarner’s advice on writing an accomplishment-focused resume. It’s a great read.
For more articles like this from me, check out /stevenmadesigns.
