A lot of resume advice articles you’ve seen have likely told you to keep the fluff to a minimum. In most cases, this is true. Recruiters generally only have a short amount of time to read your resume, meaning you’ll have to make it count by marketing yourself and your experiences in an easily consumable way. However, there’s no reason to dress your resume up, especially if you’re part of an industry where creativity is a highly valued skill. In fact, creating an original design for your resume may be an excellent C-level personal branding tactic, depending upon your execution. We’ve gathered some ideas for your consideration.
Lead Recruiters Your Way With a Map
Whether it’s in the style of classic and long forgotten cartography or in the image of today’s Maps app, you can consider making your resume resemble a map that leads employers straight to you, with all of your experiences and other relevant information to guide them and a handy directional key. You can even tuck your contact info at the bottom to steer them toward how to get in touch with you.
Model Your Resume After Your Social Media Platform of Choice
This takes some clever graphic design skills on your part, but it’s a creative way of introducing yourself to a potential employer. You can do this with any type of platform that gives you a personalized space, whether it’s through a profile page or a blog, or with any site that’s well-recognized and widely used. We recommend not picking LinkedIn for this choice because it’s already formatted for job hunters. You’ll want to create your own unique take on a site not typically used for career networking.
Create Your Resume Out of a Unique Material
This can be an especially clever idea depending on the industry you’re in, such as textiles, fashion or something similar. While it may take some extra work, you can craft your resume from fabric, handmade paper or some other material besides plain, white Xerox paper. Just make sure the end result is readable and, if need be, easy to reproduce. You don’t want to make creating hundreds of copies of a plexiglass resume your new career!
Give Yourself Ratings
You can easily style this sort of resume fairly normally but with some more subtle creative embellishments here and there, up until you get to the final section describing your skills. For this section, utilize a ratings system for an easily readable way of determining your level of skill in any areas you wish. While this won’t necessarily give employers the most detailed idea of your skills, it’s certainly an eye catcher!
While there’s nothing wrong with the tried and true method of bullet points and short sentences in black, 12 point font, it never hurts to think outside of the box! For further tips, you can always consult a professional resume writing service. A top resume writing service will be able to fine tune your resume, regardless of the format.
By Erin Kennedy, MCD, CMRW, CPRW, BS/HR, a Certified Professional & Executive Resume Writer/Career Consultant, and the President of Professional Resume Services, Inc. She has achieved international recognition following nominations and wins of the prestigious T.O.R.I. (Toast of the Resume Industry) Award. Find Erin at http://exclusive-executive-resumes.com.