Résumés Are Starting to Look Like Instagram, and Sometimes Even Tinder

I'd be fine with a resume that included some modern design elements, especially if it were a position which might involve some design work. A "by the numbers" summary could make it easier to see the points a candidate thinks are important.

But a photograph would make me immediately pass. There's no way for me to be sure I can avoid prejudice. I already hate that resumes include names/addresses in such a prominent place. Those should be off to the side, so they can easily be removed before the resume even gets to me.

> The flashy résumés are colliding with efforts by employers to strip down CVs to their most basic elements—coding skills, college degrees, work histories—to reduce bias in hiring. Many companies run résumés through tools called applicant tracking systems that remove photos and other design embellishments. Others are looking for ways to blind out even names and addresses, which could reveal gender, race or socioeconomic status.

Exactly! We should be trying to reduce bias in hiring, not add to it. This is exactly what is meant by "privilege". Either they're hoping to get hired based on how they look, or they don't realize or care that they're creating more work for someone else to strip out all this junk before anyone can read it.

As a professional resume writer I'm seeing a lot of clients now asking for more design on their resumes (including many senior clients with solid accomplishments) and it's a disturbing trend. I think part of the blame can go to the handful of companies that have gone viral with highly visualized 'mock' resumes for tech celebrities (Elon Musk and Marissa Mayer - example https://enhancv.com/resume-examples/famous/marissa-mayer/).

These resumes certainly "look good", but they aren't useful. Obviously, it doesn't matter what your resume looks like if you're Elon Musk - you're getting the interview anyway.

With visualized resumes, the user is sacrificing the ability to provide a more robust list of accomplishments, or perhaps to provide additional details and context for the accomplishments they have listed.

If you are junior level and don't have many accomplishments to mention, a visualized resume might get their attention. For senior level candidates or even mid-career folks who have already done a thing or two, these resumes look like an ill-fitting suit.

Don't distract your reader with fancy formatting. Using a simple format allows the reader to focus entirely on what is important (your body of work) without being distracted.

As a current Gen Z applying to jobs, I think this trend is very minor and depends on the industry. Anecdotally, in all the tech career fairs and networking events/resume drops I've been to, 95% of resumes follow the traditional format without a hint of color. The other 5% are people who downloaded a flashy template for the first time and don't know what they're doing. For designers, I think it's reasonable to have a "unique" resume design, but for other non-visual jobs it's just in poor taste.

> ...received a résumé for a finance job earlier this year that included an avatar of the applicant sweating.

> “That was to show they hustle like no one else,” says John Lowe, the company’s chief executive. “That is an important attribute that we prize.”

That has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've heard

I’m not sure which trend I dislike more, this one, or the general throwing out of the “two pages or fewer” guideline. I regularly get CVs which are four or five pages long, listing everything the person has ever done back to high school. Learn to tailor your CV people, I don’t care that you worked at Subway for six weeks when you were nineteen. I would however love to hear more than a list of technologies used about the three years you spent working in a similar sector.

I think the source of this is professional "career adviser" types.

When applying for jobs out of school, I was told:

1. I needed to "tell stories" about myself (doesn't matter if they're true)

2. I needed to boast in my resume about my "accomplishments" using buzzwords

3. I needed to have some kind of catchy elevator pitch describing myself

4. I needed at least one "playful" descriptor (e.g. "semicolon enthusiast" or something like that)

5. Lying on your resume is expected and totally fine

6. I needed to apply for ~10 positions a week

All of these things made me deeply uncomfortable. I don't think self-description is possible. We reveal ourselves through our actions and nothing matters less than "how you view yourself". When people attempt to describe themselves they tend to list things that they want other people to believe about them but have no correspondence in reality.

I disregarded all of this advice and worked really hard on my projects. I didn't do any "coding interview prep" and during my interviews I admitted when I didn't know something and explained what I thought I knew about it. This worked well for me; I didn't have any trouble finding a job.

> “spin aficionado, dog lover, foodie, outdoor enthusiast.”

I don't know about marketing, but if I received a CV with this I'd most likely throw it straight in the trash. I don't want CVs to be unique, I judge people based on merit. The more basic the CV the better in my opinion. Just the other day I was slightly upset when someone showed me a candidates LinkedIn profile containing quite a non-professional picture because it immediately put me off a bit.

Were resumes ever really useful for more than sending very specific signals? I suspect they probably never were. Hiring managers just put them all into buckets "Ivy League, good college, has professional experience," and unless there were obvious red flags, just called everyone on the list that they wanted to hire and let the interview process sort them out.

If you needed more vetting on the inbound, then it's easier to just source candidates another way than to try to read the resume tea leaves.

A resumé is advertising. A resumé is marketing. A few thoughts:

A resumé is not a biography. It' a pitch. When was the last time anyone tried to sell you a product or service with a white sheet of paper and black ink? Exactly.

The six page--or ten page--credentials document is for the interview.

For a recent project management position, Facebook received 10,000 resumés. That's too many for the HR department ro review. FB, like many others, use automated systems to weed through these. Graphic and marketing details, innovations, are lost.

You can try to game the system: post the job requirements in a white font on white so all the keywords are there. But this is an inexact science.

For a small to medium size business, the "new" c.v. has as good or better chance than the traditional c.v.

I'll admit, the headline and the general comments here biased me to waving my fist at the clouds and shouting "hell yeah! These youngsters don't appreciate tradition no more!", BUT, the examples in the article are actually reasonable.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, hiring is a two-way street. Certain industries and professions don't appreciate this creative approach, however young folks entering the workforce are fighting to be seen above the crowds. If your company is particular about specific information and formatting, use an applicant tracking system and/or job board that forces your applicants to apply your way. But if you ask for resumes to an email account, or if colleges are still requesting "resume drops" for firms looking to hire on-campus, then folks are going to try grab attention to move the process forward in any way they can.

End of (work) life stage with 37 years continuous employment in two economies and 7-10 employees under my belt, I do not believe I could cope in this hiring market, at these behaviours.

I do not envy the cohorts surviving in this market/model. I feel we screwed things up, allowing HR to drive to this, and I feel we overplay "selling" in hiring, instead of letting people reach out and find like minds. I realize its a highly competitive market, but I think we've allowed the distortions to overtake the real intent.

I do not believe this is a good model. I do not want to participate or facilitate this model of resume/CV and hiring.

You know what kind of resume stands out? A traditional one with nice formatting, nothing extraneous (if you have a college degree I don't care where you went to high school), and no typos.

Maybe 25% of resumes that I see hit all of these criteria. If you can't pay attention to detail on a one-page resume that you update every year or two and send out to every job that you apply to, then how can I possibly expect that you are going to pay attention to detail in the code that you write?

Gen Z is smart. If you can look good, which isn't hard to do when most resumes have no photo, I have no doubt you'll get ahead.

20/20 episode on "lookism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTfRRmFC4-c

TL;DR of the video: Good looks will get you hired, make you more money, and make people think you're smarter.

This could be done tastefully, but the examples they are showing seem rather extreme and not tasteful at all. I'd probably not even read a resume that had a "By The Numbers" section. It's such a useless metric to try to highlight.

I include a very brief summary (< 1 line) that details most of my professional work history (not always tech related, but illustrates progressive responsibility), so I'm probably one of the people whose resume gets thrown out (per some of the posters) on the regular. I'm OK taking that kind of risk because I'm looking for a manager/team who understands a team member is more than the sum of what's on their targeted 1 page resume. Although I'm sure you're all great managers, I can appreciate being weeded out early.

Next time I have to apply to a job with a resume, I swear, I'm just going to use one formatted in raw markdown and limited to a page in readable font.

It makes sense that resumes are becoming better designed: we have been told for years now that recruiters only spend seconds looking at a resume, and many people now have the tools to create a well designed resume. The irony here is that employers are declining candidates on the basis of overdesigning their resume, given that they are ostensibly advocating the position that only the content is important.

Judging from the discussions here i get the sense that hiring is primarily an exercise to avoid biases in the US. Which probably means that the bigger problem is that most CVs look the same nowadays, with lots of people checking all the points for a job. Which probably means CVs are not a good way to source candidates , but what else is there out ther?

I've seen some very beautifully designed resumes, some even looking more like work of art than a primarily utilitarian document it essentially is (or supposed to be). I can not deny I liked the beautiful ones, but only to the point - if the content did not match what I needed, I rejected it without a second thought, maybe with a slight sigh of "well, it was a beautiful resume, too bad it's not going anywhere". Moreover, having to go through a pile of literally hundreds, I didn't have much time to admire fine design points too much, and by the time it comes to select candidates which get to the point of in person interview and other considerations, everybody would forget how the resume looked like. So for technical candidate it probably does not matter, even if personally I like aesthetically pleasing ones - just it won't help any on actual technical merits.

> The school ultimately felt the bitmoji résumé was inappropriate.

> “We’re not a lot of crotchety old people who don’t understand how bitmojis work,” says Ms. Posthuma, who is 41. “It looked very juvenile.”

Seems juvenile to overlook the substance of a resume just because the person also shows their personality. It's unfortunate more people don't care about the actual skills needed for the job and instead make hiring decisions on the weirdest possible criteria. My favorite, very common, example: throwing out a resume because it has a typo for positions where typos don't really matter (most positions).

An approach where you stand out seems to make a lot of sense, nevertheless. You can be an "average" candidate and literally never get the job because they're only hiring one person for the position. An approach that turns some off but gets the attention of a few makes sense in many scenarios.

These might be the most misunderstood, dogmatically constructed documents that exist. In reality, a bit of common sense and a basic understanding of how recruitment processes tend to work will go a long way. Hopefully for those new to the job market who don't yet have that understanding, a careers advisor or similar mentor will help them to acquire it quickly.

If you're applying somewhere big and you haven't established any prior connection then chances are you're going to be screened by some sort of automated system as a first step, so you need to provide sufficient information in sufficiently recognisable terms to clear that hurdle. Sometimes this is little better than a tedious keyword-matching exercise, but it's a necessary first step if you're not in a position to reach a real person at your potential employer from the start.

In any case, the first human being to read your CV/resume and make a real decision on progressing your application or not is probably going to be spending seconds, not minutes, reviewing it. Chances are they'll be looking for your general area(s) of competence and approximate level of experience to see if you fit the required profile, and any obvious red flags that would disqualify you immediately. Anything else is a potentially damaging distraction at this stage.

Subsequent human beings to read your CV/resume will hopefully be involved in the in-person recruiting process, i.e., phone screens, on-site interviews, etc. These people are probably going to spend a bit longer reading now you're on a short(er) list, but they're probably looking for the opposite: what particular qualities or specific accomplishments make you stand out from the crowd as a better candidate?

It follows from the above that an effective CV/resume should probably include just enough filler and buzzwords to get past an automated filter, just enough overview material to show you're the right sort of candidate, and then a few carefully selected highlights to intrigue the people making the real decisions in the later stages and provide interesting interview topics. Anything else, particularly a complete life history including the LOGO program you wrote at age 10 to draw a circle, is wasting everyone's time and just gives more opportunities to get rejected.

If you can't fit that on a single page at any stage in your career then improving your CV/resume writing skills will probably improve your chances of landing that next job (barring certain fields like academia, where expectations are often quite different to most recruitment processes).

Obviously CV design depends on the position you apply for. If it's design, marketing or something like that, then I'd say cool design is a big plus. For a technical position it's just distracting and off-topic.

Young Mr. Bueno has a bright future ahead of him designing WeWork SEC filings.

Swipe left to hire - now there is an enterprise HR app with viral potential

In the examples the article presents, it looks like the pendulum has swung from “dry” to “overdone” (c.f. 80s era web”). That being said, it’s a net positive that richer media are now emerging as options. It’s like research papers: from plain text to hyperref urls to full on promotional webpages (I’m looking at you Google AI).

Some might say that constraints force a pithy communication, but I’ll take a tasteful GIF over a static diagram or dense prose any day.

Outside of the US, many countries have photos on the resume.

I could recall the first time I saw one about a decade ago.

Not sure what I would do if I saw an info graphic on a resume.

Some of the examples shown were obviously bad, but others I (as a non-recruiter) thought were pretty tasteful and honestly would be pretty good at getting the candidate hired.

e.g. Valentino Bogliacino Bueno's highlights on his resume: recruiters are going to skim through his resume and he's catering to that behavior by putting the highlights of his resume prominently up front and center

What you know, what you’ve recently done. That’s literally all I want to know when a resume comes to me. I could care less about the design.

My resume is a single page. Black and white text. It does have my name and contact details. But that’s all. I did take the time to use proper formatting though. Paragraph and heading spacing for example rather than just a bunch of returns.

I am surprised, I thought having a photo on your resume is an absolute no-go in the US.

Creativity that solves a problem can be a good signal. Creativity for creativity’s sake is a mixed bag, and depends a lot on the role.

How would I describe myself? Three words. Hard-working, Alpha male, Jackhammer, Merciless, Insatiable.

Content is always king... Design follows

And it's a fad that will live and die quickly.