How to Spruce Up Your Resume

While attending a lecture by Joe Grimm, a professor at Michigan State University and a career coach, he talked about many important tasks a job seeker should do. When walking into the lecture hall wearing a Dr. Resume jacket, Grimm asked if anyone had a resume on hand. Only a few students raised their hands and he made his first point: always have a resume on you and ready. 

Not only does he suggest to be resume ready always, but he suggests a passionate cover letter, online portfolio, a LinkedIn account and possibly a video resume if relevant to your career. Grimm stressed that you must leave a digital footprint. Many employers, like Professor Grimm, won’t consider someone for a position if they are not digitally connected. “If they don’t have a LinkedIn account,” Grimm says, “I won’t hire them.” He assumes they are not plugged-in to the world of social media, a skill necessary when in media related fields. 

Every year, you should have something new on your resume, Grimm advised. He says you should try to keep updated work on file because you never know when someone could be looking at your work. His last, solid piece of advice: “dare to be interesting.”

Employers sometimes receive hundreds of resumes for one position, and many of them sound good on paper. So how do you make your resume interesting? How do you stand out from the rest? 

In creative fields, employers look for people who think outside the box. Instead of handing them the Times Roman, black-and-white, bullet-pointed piece of paper you call your resume, imagine ways to show your skills before they meet you. 

First things first. When going into the workforce, brand, market and sell yourself. Not only will you be pitching ideas for an ad campaign or a story idea for their magazine, you’ll be pitching to the interviewer reasons why you’re best for the job. Branding yourself consists of an online portfolio, resume, cover letter, blog and anything else potential employers might see, and they have a cohesive appearance. 

According to an article on Vault Blogs website titled Pros and Cons of Info-graphic Resumes, some info-graphic resume formats make it easier to highlight your years of experience more clearly than on a traditional resume. The article says, “Use numbers rather than having the reader add the years you worked in each position on a typical reverse chronological resume.” There are even sites, such as Vizualize.me, that is a service that can convert your LinkedIn profile to an info-graphic resume.

By using a “trendy and new format,” Vault Blogs says it can show potential employers how you can adapt and understand new technologies. Only downside, many corporations and HR departments use a computer resume system which will not read the creative resume easily. You may want to keep a traditional, text only resume on file as well. Although, for a normal eye, making a more visually appealing resume is often times easier to read. With people seeking information faster, these types of resumes will come more important. 

When landing an internship at Meridian Entertainment group last spring, Joanna Davis, now the marketing coordinator of ZinePak, helped with hiring new interns. “Ironically, my bosses at my first internship let me go through the new applicant resumes so that I could add it as a skill on my resume.” 

It is always more important to see relevant experience rather than a high GPA, says Davis. She says experience was the key aspect when reviewing applicants as well as their major and involvement with clubs.

When shuffling through the stacks of resumes, Davis says she was personally attracted to resumes with color. “At the very least, play with typography a bit,” she says. “The hierarchy of text should be very obvious and I think it doesn’t hurt to show a bit of your personality through typography and color.”

Davis suggest using InDesign to create a resume. It is a good resource and she says you have much more creative freedom. This is best for digital submission where the standard one page is not so heavily practiced.

Picking colors to use throughout your professional pieces will help create a cohesive appearance. Use these colors on your website, resume, cover letter, and even a professional Twitter account. Pick colors that represent you as a person but aren’t obnoxious. Look into the meaning behind colors. Believe it or not, it works. 

The article on Vault Blogs says you have to be careful when it comes to colors. “The variety of formats and colors enables a job seeker to personalize his or her resume,” says Vault Blogs as one of the pros, “matching a target company’s logo colors or creating a more specific personal branding image using shapes and colors as one might use font choice in a text-only resume.” It can become a negative aspect if you use too many colors and shapes. It can become distracting for the readers.

Coming up with a personal logo is a great way strengthen your personal brand. Putting it on business cards and other materials employers see helps create an identification for someone employers might hire. This is often the first impression, and it says a lot about your skills as a creative expert. 

A benefit of being creative with your professional identity is it showcases your work before would-be employers even have the chance to read your resume. Using programs to help design your logo, resume template and websites allows you to show skills and knowledge with Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. So what if you don’t know Adobe Suite? Now is the time to learn. With YouTube videos and sites like Lynda.com, learning couldn’t be easier. Take the time to sit down and learn, because not only can you create a brand to sell to your future bosses, but you’ll become more marketable by mastering advanced computer skills. 

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