Your Résumé

Your résumé should be an error-free, creatively written, professionally designed business document which evolves with you as a designer.

Contents

Your résumé is a living document. It needs to be updated as you gain new experiences at work. As you grow as a designer, you can also change the look to better reflect your current your skills.

Do your best to keep your whole résumé to one page. This will force you to get to the point and exclude extraneous details. Prospective employers will appreciate your brevity.

Include your complete contact information in a clear and obvious manner.

When communicating your experience, don’t exaggerate nor leave things out. Include successes in previous jobs. If one of your listed successes was a team effort, say so. The ability to work in a team is actually a positive attribute.

If your previous jobs seem irrelevant to a position in graphic design, tell them which skills they gave you that will be of use to them. For example, if you worked at the returns counter at Canadian Tire, that would likely make you skilled at dealing with clients. You may even be able to tame the most rude, irate customers. That’s an asset. State that. Additionally, include travel, military, academics, accreditations, internships, volunteering and other life experience which would contribute to your value as an employee. Don’t forget to state whether you’re multi-lingual.

If you’re going to use bullet lists, use action verbs to start each item, like these:

• authored
• brainstormed
• communicated
• conceptualized
• curated
• customized
• derived
• designed
• diagramed
• drafted
• edited
• illustrated
• imagined
• influenced
• inspired
• intensified
• modeled
• proofread
• published
• redesigned
• researched
• strategized
• storyboarded
• translated
• transformed
• visualized
• wrote

Speaking of lists, you do not need to list every design software title you know. It’s enough to state that your proficiency. You can say you excel at one more than others if you specialize in a discipline—After Effects for motion graphics, for example. Do not claim to be a Photoshop god. Sorry, but you’re likely not one.

This is a no-win situation. Either you under-sell or over-sell yourself. If you state that you’re an 9/10 with Photoshop, you better deliver 9/10. If you’re 3/10, you won’t want to announce it!

The Machine Reads First

For many employers, the first to read your résumé is not a person. It’s software. An Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, takes your file, pulls the text out, then sorts it into sections. It then ranks you against the role before a human ever sees it. The bigger the organization, the more likely this is. Most government and large-company applications work this way.

You do not get to see which system you are up against. Some are modern and forgiving. Some are old and brittle. So you build for the brittle one. Here is how to stay readable.

Keep it to a single column. This is the big one. A parser reads straight across the page. Put two columns side by side and it reads right across both, mashing your job titles into your skills into a line of nonsense. The text is all there. It just arrives scrambled and lands in the wrong field. One column, top to bottom, every time.

Skip tables, text boxes, and sidebars. They break the same way a column does. Line your dates up in a table and the parser can lose the link between the date and the job it belongs to.

Use plain section headings. Experience. Education. Skills. The parser looks for these to know what it is reading. Clever labels throw it off.

Keep your type live. This is the designer’s trap. A parser can only read actual text. If you outline your type, you hand the machine a picture of words it cannot read. Export with the text intact. If you’re not sure whether you have live type, open your PDF, then try to select a line of text. If you cannot highlight it, neither can the parser.

A Word file is often the safest bet. Many parsers read .docx more reliably than a PDF. If a posting does not ask for a format, send .docx into a portal and save the beautiful PDF for when you are emailing a real person. Remember to use only Windows-native fonts in a Word document. If you don’t your resume won’t look the same when the recipient opens it.

Use their words. The system often ranks you on how well your résumé matches the posting. If they ask for Figma, write Figma, not “industry-standard UI tools.” Mirror the real terms for the software and skills you actually have. Do not stuff in words you cannot back up. The newer systems read for whether your story holds together, and a wall of buzzwords reads as noise.

Test what the machine sees. Select everything on your résumé, copy it, and paste it into a plain text file. Whatever survives, in whatever order, is roughly what the parser gets. If it reads like nonsense to you, it reads like nonsense to the software.

None of this means your résumé has to be plain. It means your craft goes into hierarchy, type, and restraint, not into columns and graphics. A clean, single-column résumé set with a good eye still looks like a designer made it. It just also survives the robot.

Design

If you do create a version of your résumé to hand to a real person, it shouldn’t be origami art. You need to gauge the degree of creativity you put into it. It’s a professional business document. It’s better simple and well executed than over-designed. Avoid clichés or contrived concepts that’ll be more of a burden on the reader. If you go overboard, the document overwhelms and confuses. If you stop short, you could be perceived as unimaginative or unmotivated.

How far do you go with your design? That’s up to you. To start, your layout, typography and colour treatment needs to be flawless to a seasoned designer. Design it to have a consistent look with your web site and other social media platforms.

Also, avoid using a template. You’re a graphic designer. Design and build your résumé from the ground up. Apply all the production skills you have.

Travel & Photography

Listing travel in your interest is obvious. Who doesn’t like a walk on the beach at sunset? Now, if you had an exceptionally remarkable travel experience, please share it. Your four-day bender in Punta Cana doesn’t cut it. Sailing a tall ship across the South Pacific. That’s something worth talking about, because it will have affected your growth as a person.

Unless you’re actually a professional photographer, gear and all, avoid listing photography as one of your skills. First, it undervalues pro photogs. Second, you better be ready to deliver a full-fledged photo shoot. Third, we’ve all taken that one incredible shot with our iPhone. One photo does not a photographer make.

Make No Mistake!

It’s crucial that you read and re-read your résumé to ensure it’s error-free. Run your spell checker. Don’t trust only your spell checker! Have others read it. Have non-designers read it. They’re not only reading for errors, they should give you feedback on the structure and the tone.

Achieving the appropriate tone in your writing is important. It can be very challenging. Your résumé is not really the place for humour. Your tone can be witty, but not flippant. It can be light-hearted, but not frivolous. It should be formal, but not overly-so. See how this isn’t simple? If you have any doubts, just state things plainly.

It’s a good idea to have more than one design of your résumé if you’re going to send it to designers vs freelance clients. Also, if it’s delivered to the person who’s going to read it versus having an ATS read it first. Tailor your résumé for the recipient.

Your Cover Letter

Write one. Even when it’s optional, the letter is a chance the résumé does not give you. The résumé is a list. The letter is where you make your argument.

Address it to a real person by name, with their title and business contact information. “To whom it may concern” tells them you didn’t do your research. Finding the name is part of the job. Get the spelling right, and get the company name right.

Keep it short in a few tight paragraphs on one page. Make it about them, not you. A strong letter leads with what you can do for them. Open with a specific reason you are writing to this employer. Their work, a project you admire, the clients they serve. One real, researched detail proves you are not sending the same letter to fifty places.

Then give them your best one or two reasons to keep reading. The single most relevant thing you have done, and where it points. The letter’s real job is to get them to open your portfolio, so send them to it.

If there was a job posting, respond to it. Use the language the posting uses. If they want someone who can handle motion and layout, speak to motion and layout in their terms. Show them the match instead of making them hunt for it.

Mind your tone the same way you do on the résumé. Formal, but human. Witty is fine. Flippant is not. When in doubt, say it plainly.

The letter should be in the body of your email, not a separate attachment.

Proofread it like your job depends on it, because it will. Read it aloud. Have someone else read it. Feed it to A.I. to check for errors. A typo in the letter that argues for your attention to detail is the worst kind of typo.

Delivery

Paper? Who needs paper? Sharing a PDF file works well and saves trees. A Word (.docx) file is often read by the ATS more reliably than a PDF. Both is best! Either way, build it to be accessible. It has to work for recipients, no matter the screen and their abilities. Ok. Have a few paper backup copies with you.

If you do create a PDF, the final step should be to open it in Acrobat. Hit ⌘-D.

• Set the Navigation tab to Page Only if you only have a single page.
• Set Page Layout to Single Page.
• Set Magnification to Full Page.

When the recipient opens your PDF, it’ll be zoomed to show the whole page.

If you send out a resume in PDF format, make sure to name the file with your name. Appleseed-Johnny-Resume.pdf. The recipient may receive hundreds of them. They need to be able to find yours in the crowd.

You can e-mail your PDF as an attachment. You should also keep it in the cloud, in Dropbox or in Google Drive. Leave it in the same location in case someone goes back to retrieve it at a later date.