Designers: Stop designing your resumes

Over the last year, I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to hire five design professionals to my team. I've seen hundreds of resumes, and as a Creative Director, you would assume I want them to look "designed", to encompass a personal brand, I mean, everything we produce as designers needs to look engaging, right? Right?

What if I told you I could care less about how pretty your resume looks? What if I told you it does more harm than good? This could be unique to me as a hiring manager, but your resume should highlight your experiences and successes, not showcase your design chops. Any attempt to over-design the standard resume format is not only a distraction, but it's most likely my first impression of you and your design skills. Is your resume portfolio worthy? I've never seen one that was.

All a designed resume does is tell me about your personal design tastes, it shouldn't and can't be a reflection of your actual work (unless you're a professional resume designer? Is that a thing?) - but in the case of the jobs I'm hiring for, that work needs to show extensive knowledge of layout, expressive type, understanding of color theory, executive presence, team collaboration, and more. A designed resume with a dynamic color theme, kerned type, and unique infographics about your skills will never equal the skill and breadth expressed in your portfolio work.

Look, I'm not saying that designed resumes look bad, but from my experience, 99% of these resumes prioritize the document's design over the content. In a resume, the content is crucial, and any distraction from that is not helpful. Does your design make the content easier to read or understand? Probably not. It might even harm your chances if, for any reason, it makes your content harder to understand. The argument may be, "But I'm trying to stand out!". Well, you can do that with copy, and you need to do that with your portfolio. Your designed resume will not get any more attention than that other designed resume, or a plain old resume for that fact, because I need to read the content to understand how applicants' experiences match the job description.

Ask yourself, would you rather the hiring manager's first impression of you be "meh" because your resume design fails to show your actual creative and messaging capabilities, or would you rather they say, "oh, wow, look at their experience and impact they've made during their career."

I'm not judging you if your resume only uses Calibri and doesn't have a hint of color. And no one else in the design industry should if they don't want to miss out on amazing talent.

So, can we all agree to stop designing our resumes?

And for future tools, coaching offers, and real talk like this, sign up for my newsletter: www.amcreativecoach.com/newsletter