Whether you’re a recent graduate seeking entry-level employment or a seasoned professional looking to switch careers, navigating the job market can be difficult. A stand-out, creative resume is one way to make sure that your accomplishments and skills aren’t overlooked. Here are some tips, tricks and creative resume templates to help ensure your resume doesn’t get tossed to the side by a potential employer.
1. Color Blocking
Any designer will tell you about the importance of color: it can lead the eye, highlight the important areas and evoke an emotional response. Using blocks of color to guide the reader through your resume will not only help with flow and comprehension, it will get your resume to stand out from the numerous applicants. Check out Clean CV-Resume II from Estartshop. The black block at the top gives a bold impression of the applicant’s name and title, and the pink bar on the side highlights contact information.
2. Say Cheese!
A photo is a great introduction to a recruiter, and it lets them feel the human behind the sheet of paper. It can be as small as a wallet, like in the example above, or more like the Facebook cover photo as seen here. Your smiling, professional face is a creative resume asset that can really help win over hiring managers.
3. Font Choices
People pick up on details, whether they recognize it or not. Creative resume fonts are a subtle way to communicate your personality. Take these two fonts, for example: Stone Harbour and Naive. Both are bold choices that may not be appropriate for most career paths, but for some — like artists, writers or designers — these two fonts could reveal details about your style that would be hard to convey from simple text.
4. Brevity
Keep your resume essential and on point.
5. Blank Space
This point goes hand-in-hand with the former: a cluttered resume will get dropped fast. Elegant Resume/CV V2 by Bilmaw Creative has a particularly good use of white space. Notice how the subtle color blocks and blank space make up a bulk of the composition of the page. However, in the text areas, there is a dense amount of information. There is an even balance between clutter and emptiness that make the resume feel whole.
6. Craft Your Layout
This aspect of getting your resume to stand out is an amalgamation of the above tips. Compare and contrast these resumes: Jamie, Aqua and Resume Template +. Jamie follows the center line while Aqua and RT+ are based on the left margin. RT+ uses bold color blocks to draw your eye while Aqua and Jamie are quite minimalist — except for the bold ribbon accent in Aqua.
7. Choose a Style
Think of your resume like the outfit you’ll wear to the job interview. How you design your resume is about how you present yourself. If you have trouble figuring out the kind of colors, fonts and choices that suit you, use sites like Pinterest and Tumblr to create a style board or blog for inspiration.
8. Utilize Infographics
The rise in graphic design has really upped the ante for creative resume templates, and you’ll find many that include infographics. These are great ways to quantify and combine your experience and skills and accentuate them in ways words can’t. Minimalism and ZippyPixels’s Infographic Resume are great examples.
9. Show Yourself!
Your resume and cover letter are crucial to the hiring manager knowing if you are right for the job, so don’t be afraid to be your best professional self. Don’t gloss over your achievements. When possible, quantify results and showcase the most important takeaways – this is your time to brag!
10. Prioritize Your Information
Resumes don’t have to follow a set structure, so make yours cater to your strongest attributes. Recent graduates may feel they lack professional experience, so they should prioritize their educational achievements when thinking about the layout and style of their resume.
This is by no means an essential to-do list, since every industry has different standards for acceptable creative resumes. Instead, it is a tool box to be used at your discretion when designing your own or browsing resume templates. What is important to you when creating your resume? If you have ever been a position of hiring, what made resumes stand out to you?
BONUS: Did you know we’re hiring?
There are many exciting positions opening up at Creative Market. Make sure to check out our careers page and send your creative new resume our way.
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