Designing Your Resume
When crafting your resume, there are many things that I want to see as a hiring manager. I want to understand your skills, your experience, and get to know you a little bit.
What I don’t want to see on your resume are the following:
EXCEPTIONAL in-ATTENTION TO DETAIL
In the above example, the Designer suggests “exceptional attention to detail” but in the line just below, has clearly added an extra space after the word departments and before the period. It doesn’t help that the text is a bit clunky from a grammar perspective but it’s secondary to the spacing issue WHICH JUMPS RIGHT OUT OF THAT PARAGRAPH…
I once had the opportunity to help a Design professor I know critique her class’s final projects. One Designer’s work was excellent, however, on each of the six pages of his presentation, were two or more spelling or grammatical errors. So I said to him, “Hey I really like your work. Your sketch skills are exceptional and the ideas themselves are clever. (always provide feedback on strengths first) But I see that you have numerous spelling and grammatical errors throughout your presentation, why is that?”
Him: “I’m dyslexic.”
Me: “Oh? And did you just find out today?”
Him: “No, I’ve known for quite awhile.”
Me: “And is your roommate also dyslexic?”
HIm: “No? Why do you ask?”
Me: “Because if you knew you were dyslexic, and you knew your roommate wasn’t, you could easily have asked her to check your work. Or anyone else you know that isn’t dyslexic.”
The lesson here is to check your work or ask for help. My English isn’t perfect either so when I have to write for work, I ask for people to edit my writing. Dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s because, as in the above example, the work itself looks terrible if it’s accompanied by easily avoidable mistakes.
If you present work that is riddled with errors, the assumption is that you don’t care enough for the work to do a good job, and you won’t be hired.
USELESS INFORMATION GRAPHICS
I’ve written about this trend of using infographics on your resume, but this example takes the cake. All of these skills are, apparently, equal. Most of the times I see these infographics, there is at least some variation in the levels or amounts of each skill.
Additionally, (and this is just icing on the cake I just mentioned) note the variation in size of the heights of each bar and the variation of spacing between the text and the bars themselves. This person is applying for a job in visual design.
Lastly, we have to help less experienced Designers make better choices about the way they describe their skills. What do you think this Designer meant by listing UI/UX Design, Web Design, and Visual Design separately? UI/UX in particular is an awful way to say that you’re both a User Interface Designer and User Experience Designer. But I can let that go against the other mistakes listed here.
THE ABC’S OF DESIGN
Disregard the poor grammar and the awful typography. Ignore the lack of X, Y or Z items on the list. Wonder about why the Designer has bolded the B in Office Branding in the middle where they were on O, but don’t wonder too much. I wonder what Standees are because…well… I don’t know.
Just don’t do this on your resume. It tells me that you’ve designed many things, but my guess from the poor layout of this paragraph, that you’ve designed them poorly. Most importantly, I have no context for this list. I don’t know what problems you were trying to solve, nor do I know when you did each of these things and the ABC thing isn’t clever. It’s stupid and there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. :)
What do you think? What are the worst resume mistakes you’ve seen?
