A resume is the first impression you can give an employer. A badly designed resume will only result in one thing – no calls from possible employers. Do use this article as a checklist when making your own resume. We’ve put down nine tips that we believe will help you make a better impression.
1. Apply for relevant positions! As ridiculously simple as this may sound, you’d be surprised at the numbers of people who send in their CVs to irrelevant job positions simply because they saw it on a job portal. This only wastes time for everyone concerned.
2. Design it with care. If you are a designer, you should design your resume and not just put down text! A designer’s resume should portray the person’s design abilities with subtle graphic touches.
3. Don’t make it too long. A resume should be no longer than two pages, preferably just one. Lets face it, no employer wants to read through a candidate’s entire life history! So put down only the relevant work experience.
4. Do not stuff it with action words. A few years ago, it was a trend but today it just doesn’t work. Use readable language that you expect the employer to go through quickly. No point writing phrases that go over your own head!
5. Keep it simple! Keep the text short and sweet, straight to the point. Also, remember that any information you put in needs to be absolutely accurate, like an FBI file!
6. Make it print friendly. Sometimes designers can make super-impressive CV templates for their resumes forgetting the fact that the design may look terrible when printed on an ordinary paper on an ordinary printer. So – if you are using background hues and texture for the resume template, take a printout on ordinary paper and see how it looks. Not every one would have a photo quality printer and photo paper to print out your CV!
7. Put in some links. If you are sending in your CV through email, why not put in some links to your best site designs?
8. Include your portfolio, or at least a link to it. Most design companies will require you to provide a portfolio along with the resume, so do read the job posting well. If you do not have an online portfolio yet, it is important that you do make one. You do not have to spend a dime for it, many free hosting sites are more than sufficient for an online portfolio.
9. Do not EVER try and pass off someone else’s work as your own. This is sadly what does happen at times, resulting in a lose-lose situation for both the employer and the designer, more so for the designer in question. At the very least you would get permanently debarred from ever applying to the company again. As for the company’s waste of time, some may even go as far as to prosecute you and rightly so!
