Résumés That Stand Out the Right Way

There are right ways to dress for a job interview. Sure, you want to stand out to an extent. You don’t want to blend into the sea of suits that march before the hiring committee. But, um, you don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons. Probably shouldn’t wear a catwoman costume to an interview for at an engineering firm.

The same advice applies to résumés. When I talk about résumés with students, I do encourage them to do things that will make themselves stand out a little.

Traditional résumés can get very boring when you’re reading through a stack of 20 or 30 of them. If students can make themselves stand out, they have a better chance of being noticed–and we all know that being noticed can lead to getting that job.

It’s just as important, though, to talk about how audience comes into play in preparing résumés. You can teach this lesson quickly and clearly with the Dzine blog collection of “27 Examples of Impressive Resume(CV) Designs,” which my friend @Alliegator8u found and shared.

• Go over résumés as you normally would, exploring more traditional examples in your text or online.
• Share the DZine collection of résumés with students and encourage general feedback and discussion. You can click on the résumés to see larger versions.
• Once general discussion dies down, ask students to think about the jobs that they would apply for themselves. You might group students with like career goals for this project. Have students brainstorm some details about the positions and companies they will send resumes to. Emphasize that students are effectively completing an audience analysis for these companies.
• Return to the DZine collection of résumés. With their audience analysis in mind, ask students to identify which of the résumés might stand out and still fit with the needs and expectations of the audience companies. Encourage students to read through the comments on the page for some interesting discussion as well.

It’s likely that some of the more intriguing DZine résumés will be inappropriate. While they are clever and eye-catching, most of the résumés are suited only for edgier graphic design positions and companies.

I don’t think I’d encourage MrSunnyBlack or Sofiane42 to send those résumés to a conservative company. But Kenji2030 and Kamilmytnik might have a reasonable mix of traditional elements and “wow” design that would let their résumés stand out without ending up in the decline pile. As the résumés should make clear to students, it’s all a matter of the audience the résumés are presented to.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Alaskan Dude]