How much do you know about Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest invention? Even though we’re well into the 21st century, the resume still serves as an important communication tool when establishing new professional relationships. Learn how to write an effective resume and help it achieve its purpose–getting you as many design job opportunities as possible!
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Ayan: [00:00:00] All right. Well, I'm ready to go if y'all're ready to go. (laughs)
Evan: [00:00:02] Right. Get excited about resumes. Get excited about resumes. Here we go.
Howdy friends! This is the Ascend UX Podcast, a show about the experience of user experience design. I'm Evan Sunwall.
Ayan: [00:00:34] And I'm Ayan Bihi
Evan: [00:00:36] So Ayan, we're talking about resumes today! We're going to cover some tips and advice, good practices to make a great resume to get that next UX opportunity.
This is just general blanket advice for all of you out there. There are some other special circumstances: if you're switching careers, if you're a student, We may talk about that in the future.
And also this advice is kind of skewed towards North America. It may be something you need to adjust if you're applying to jobs in other locales that have other expectations with resumes.
HISTORY OF THE RESUME
Ayan: [00:01:06] Let's get this resume party started... do you know the history of the resume?
Evan: [00:01:11] No, I know absolutely nothing about the history of resumes.
Ayan: [00:01:14] Well before we get into that, let's break down the etymology of the word "resume". It's French and it means "a summary", which kind of makes sense if you think of the intention of what we're making a resume for, right? We're summarizing who we are, what we've done, and when we've done it.
But let's get back to the history. Apparently, it goes back to the one and only Leonardo DaVinci.
Evan: [00:01:36] Really?
Ayan: [00:01:37] Yes! So apparently in 1482, Leonardo, as I like to call him, wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan in an attempt to gain his patronage and support. So he summarized everything he had done and handed it over to the Duke in hopes of being employed.
Evan: [00:01:54] Huh...
USABILITY DESIGN FOR A RESUME
Ayan: [00:01:55] So Evan, we've spoken about the root of the word resume. We've spoken about the history of resume. What is the purpose of what we know today as a resume?
Evan: [00:02:06] The purpose of a resume is to advance your application to the next step of a hiring process for as many job opportunities as possible, by accurately communicating your educational and work experience.
Ayan: [00:02:20] Okay. So for me to take everything I've done based on my education and also to compliment that with my work experiences.
Evan: [00:02:26] That's right.
Ayan: [00:02:27] Is there an experience for creating a resume? Like for example, our audience — UX designers, or people who want to get into UX design — when they're creating their resume, should they be thinking about who will be reading their resume and adapting it based on that idea?
Evan: [00:02:43] Yes, we should understand our persona. Who are we targeting? We're targeting hiring managers, possibly recruiters, because they're the people who are going to be consuming this document.
You got to think of them as people who spend — and I looked this up — six seconds reading or scanning this resume. That is a very little amount of time.
They often have a lot of applicants. They're giving precious little attention to what you put in that resume. They are very pressed for time. They may feel pressure to fill the job quickly because work is piling up and losing the job could happen. They're under pressure to fill the role they may feel anxious about hiring an unqualified or destructive or toxic person. They may also not have been given training on how to even conduct interviews or even screen resumes.
And they want to hire someone who is growth-oriented, who collaborates well with colleagues, receives feedback with grace and gets things done.
Ayan: [00:03:42] That definitely does modify the person-who's-creating-their-resume's intention, right? Not only summarize your education and work experiences — that's a task in itself — but then how does stick out within six seconds to somebody who has a lot of work ahead of them?
Evan: [00:03:56] It is a little bit tricky, but it can be done. And we're going to help you with that.
Ayan: [00:04:00] Yeah. And just going back to our episode with Crystal, I think one thing she said as a recruiting agent is "Tell me your story", and that's a great way to stick out from the rest. You're not just really showing the same skills and experience everybody else has but putting forward yourself as well.
Evan: [00:04:14] A good way to tell a professional story is to know what matters so that you can hit the high points.
Ayan: [00:04:20] Evan, there's a big debate out there about resumes in regards of length. Should I have a one-page resume? Should I have two pages? Because again, you said summarize my educational and professional experiences. That could be a lot.
Evan: [00:04:32] Everyone gets basically one page. And the reason for that is imagine if you are a hiring manager and you have 150 applicants all take two pages — or even more — to describe themselves. It is daunting. It is exhausting. The one-page limit is a hard constraint. Make sure that you use those six seconds that you get on average to the best of your ability.
Ayan: [00:04:54] Yeah, that's definitely a good point, and also to emphasize that this is not the end, this is just an introduction of who you are. And the goal by doing that right is to open up a dialogue with the future company that will hire you.
Evan: [00:05:06] When you're creating this one-page document, you can adjust the margins, you can use smaller font size. You probably don't want want to go below 10. It does need to be readable at some level, but you may need to reduce it based on the length of your job history and the type of content you're putting on there.
And this is going to put some pressure on you. You're going to have elements in your resume that you may want to keep, and you can't keep it. And that's kind of the point.
FORMATTING
Ayan: [00:05:31] Okay. So you spoke about it quickly there Evan, in regards of font size and margins: how important is visual design when creating a resume?
Evan: [00:05:40] There is a little bit of importance. Even for the researchers out there, just a little bit of care in how you create this document is important because we're in the design realm.
Don't overdo it. It's very easy to overdo this. Pick one font, maybe two, if you want to be a little bit fancy, but stick with it. Serif or sans-serif fonts doesn't really matter, it's a stylistic choice. Use a web-safe font. Don't get cursive fonts, don't get creative, don't try to overdo it with typography.
Avoid background fills. A standard white document is what you want to do. Fills can get affecting the contrast and the readability of text.
Generally stick with near-black text on a white background for maximum contrast. Print it out on your personal printer, black-and-white. How's it look? Is it readable? Is it washed out and hard to read? Make some adjustments.
I know personally when I like to go through resumes, there's nothing like having the physical document in front of you to mark up. The reading experience is just a little bit different with a physical document. So I have printed them out in the past and I can tell you some of them don't turn out very well. Some of them are illegible. It's the visual design that's getting in the way of the heart and soul of your summary.
Ayan: [00:06:49] We live in such a digital-first world today, it's to keep in mind that this document might take different forms than from what you sent it.
But if I may play a little devil's advocate, we're talking about having only six seconds and you're competing against a huge stack of other resumes. Could visual design actually help you to stick out from the rest?
Evan: [00:07:08] It can. There's no arguing that a little bit of visual interest can be effective. But you want to make sure that it doesn't compete with your job history, the things you've accomplished, and your education.
So if you do anything like that, try to keep it just in the header, keep it very minimal. Resist the temptation to have it overgrow and start to compete with the content that you're trying to convey.
STRUCTURE & WHAT TO INCLUDE
Ayan: [00:07:32] So how should I structure a resume?
Evan: [00:07:34] Okay. This is all general advice. There may be some specific guidelines we talked to for a career switcher or a student, but this is just kind of a general guideline for everyone. You're trying to retell this chronological story of your career.
We're thinking of big chunks, top-down from the page: the header area, which is your name, location, phone, email, portfolio link, maybe a little bit of that visual brand treatment if that's something that you have available. Then, underneath that, every paid job you've had since — I'm using air quotes — "adulthood", and every job should have a job title, company, location, how long you worked that job with months, responsibilities, what it was this job expected to do, and accomplishments. How well did you do it?
University college-level education with the degree name, granting institution, the year you earned it, and the GPA, if you've earned it within the last couple of years. And there you have it: the fundamentals of a strong resume.
Ayan: [00:08:33] So from what you've seen and what you've kind of taken away from those experiences, is there a certain way for people to write down their responsibilities from their past jobs or even their accomplishments?
Evan: [00:08:45] If there's one thing you take away from this — other than do it on one page — it is people often conflate, " what was I expected to do" and " how would I personally do it"
So when you look at responsibilities, think of it as two to three sentences, look at a job description. What is the job expected to do? Describe it. Rather concisely, you don't want it to take up too much space, but what was the job expected to do? If you're a student, think about the coursework you took. The projects you performed that speak to you demonstrating and learning those skills and abilities.
The accomplishments are external validation of how well you did it. Awards, comments from your boss or manager, metrics, improvement... like "20% increase in conversion rate on this e-commerce shopping website". That's the stuff that really speaks to your ability to get things done.
And many, many, many, many, many people have no accomplishments to speak of. They hope you just look at the logo of the company and say, "Look at that, look at that shiny tech company" or, “that brand you know, look at it. Yeah, I did awesome stuff". What did you actually do? "Well, I was responsible for doing usability testing." Well, how many did you do? How well did you do it? What did it accomplish?
Many people when they have a lack of accomplishments, they just load it up with what they were expected to do. From a candidate perspective, if you want to shine, if you want to stand out, like really stand out, think about what you accomplished and put it into the resume. Don't have just your general responsibilities.
Your resume will look different, and it will be more persuasive if you take that approach.
Ayan: [00:10:23] And do you have an example of how many accomplishments that should be included or responsibilities that should be included?
Evan: [00:10:29] This could get get a little tough if you have a long job history, because as you try to work within that one-page constraint, you want to try to like have one accomplishment per job, just to show that you did something meaningful, that you made it count when you were working that job. And maybe you try to summarize the responsibilities a little more concisely, a little more to-the-point to kind of work it in the one-page space. Recent history, give yourself a little more space, hopefully two, three, four, that really show how you're currently in the present day doing well.
Ayan: [00:11:01] That makes it even more of a daunting task because it’s hard sometimes to create the list of the responsibilities, especially when you're in the job. And you kind of have your head in the task and especially accomplishments. That's what I personally find difficult in resume-building is you kind of have to hype yourself, but at the same time be a bit modest. So it's finding that little balance.
Evan: [00:11:20] There's always tomorrow, if it's something like "I don't know if I have any!" Well, tomorrow you can start paying attention, recognize it when when people give you external validation of how well you're doing, remember it, write it down, document it, so that it makes this task just a little bit easier.
And the more you breed that practice within you, you'll know, "Hey, so-and-so said I did an excellent job. Hey, that project is doing a lot better because I did X, Y, and Z." You'll start to recognize that and make a note to yourself and it'll get a little bit easier over time.
WHAT NOT TO INCLUDE
Ayan: [00:11:52] I like the positivity. So we talked about what we should include. Are there certain things that should not be included in a resume?
Evan: [00:12:00] All right. Time to get controversial. Here we go.
Objective statements. I don't find it personally persuasive because it's rather subjective. You can describe yourself however you like, or what you want out of a career. I skip those. It doesn't really tell me anything very useful about how will you do the job.
Hobbies, irrelevant.
References. Not terribly persuasive or indicative of how well you do the job, because you just pick friends, colleagues to say, " they're really great". It's really actually time-consuming to do from a hiring perspective to call people up and question them and ask them. And it's just hard to get a really accurate portrayal of a person's performance. So I don't actually use those either.
And the big one: lists of skills and technologies, because you could just put anything there. You could put a laundry list of Axure and Figma and Sketch, and that's cool. And maybe you can game an applicant tracking system by putting a bunch of buzzwords. But what did you do with these things? Where did you learn how to use this? That often fills up a lot of space, and so people do a lot of, it's just like, "I'm just going to make a giant list".
What's a better approach is in your responsibilities and your accomplishments, reference them there. Talk about how you use that tool to get something done or complete it. The words are still in your resume, but they're not taking up a bunch of space in it without context.
Other things: your photo. They can be a source of bias. It could be a source of having your personal identity used against you in the applicant process. That's really unfortunate. And also it takes up space.
Something else to not include: mistakes. You have an infinite amount of time — loosely speaking — to correct mistakes in your resume. You can't afford them. A sign that you have multiple mistakes in your resume is that you're not particularly attentive or you don't really care that much to actually clean that up. It's not a good look.
Ayan: [00:13:50] Never underestimate the power of spellcheck.
Evan: [00:13:53] Yes! Or its inability to catch grammar mistakes, too. (laughs)
Ayan: [00:13:58] Oh, you don't trust spellcheck, then?
Evan: [00:14:00] I trust it to a degree, but I often read sentences backwards to try to catch spelling mistakes or common grammar mistakes.
Ayan: [00:14:08] Speaking of technology earlier, there's tools like Grammarly that can help somebody if it's not the language that they are very comfortable speaking, but they have to apply for a job.
Evan: [00:14:17] That's a great point. If you have just a little bit of mistrust in your skills there, you should get someone that you trust — a friend, colleague — who has more native mastery and get their point of view on how you're phrasing things or your grammar and get some feedback.
Ayan: [00:14:31] We only have six seconds and sometimes when you see a spelling error or something, it really blocks you, and it kind of makes you lose those little fine seconds that you have.
Evan: [00:14:41] Think of it this way: it's the free points. Those are free points for you to gain. Don't give them up needlessly.
Ayan: [00:14:47] And going back to one element that you said not to include — so I'm based in France and it's more common here to include a photo with your resume. Even though I’ve been working here for six years now, I've never included one, so I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's more commonplace here.
I've never noticed the importance or the relevance to include my photo. And nowadays there's LinkedIn, so if they do want to see how I look, then they can just do a little search.
Evan: [00:15:09] So let's put it this way. You have to be sensitive to the cultural norms of where the job that you're applying to. You don't want to defy them. If they're expecting a certain bit of information, you should provide it.
RESUME VS CV
Ayan: [00:15:22] So next question. We hear often resume and CV — curriculum vitae — to be exchanged between one another. Is it the same thing or is it different?
Evan: [00:15:33] They are different documents. A CV is oriented towards academia. They're longer, they're focused on publications, they're focused on conferences you've spoken to. They probably have references too. That you work for so-and-so or this program. They are for an academic audience. They are for a different audience than the persona that we were talking about before.
You should not use an academic-oriented CV to apply to industry jobs. It does not resonate with that audience, but it may actually be really effective to get an academic job. So my advice is, there could be content you may recycle. They could be very similar to each other, but if you're going to apply to industry jobs, you want to rewrite it and reformat it as a resume as we're describing it. You may have more success doing that.
Ayan: [00:16:21] So again, it goes back to the idea of adapting.
Evan: [00:16:24] It's the user experience of your resume, right? An academic professor or someone of that type of program, they just have different interests and needs and requirements than an industry hiring manager.
Ayan: [00:16:34] I think it also changed the accomplishments and achievements that you would put in your resume as it's not the same type of world.
Evan: [00:16:41] Exactly. If you apply to a job and they specifically call out, "We are looking for a CV." send both. As long as they are matching in their content, they're not like wildly different, you can just send both.
Ayan: [00:16:54] In France, the term is "CV" that's used, it’s not resume . So again, if you're moving from one country to apply to a different country, understand what are the customs in that country you're applying to.
FILE FORMATTING
So going back to the topic of applying for a job. Are there certain file types that a resume should be?
Evan: [00:17:12] For good or for bad, Microsoft word DocX, that is the file type that will serve you well. It is the one that's most widely recognized by different applicant-tracking systems.
PDF is also fine. You can certainly be a little more expressive with a PDF. It's best if you're sending it to a human being. If you're sending it directly to a hiring manager, may want to try PDF because it's going to be human-read and it'll have the best formatting. Sending it to a system, Word is probably your better bet.
There's always room for a plain text file, TXT. It's going to look... not good, but it will have all the content and it'll be the most easily read.
And the last one, which is not exactly a file type, is LinkedIn. It is often used by recruiters and hiring managers. Use that as maybe even your home base for all your accomplishments, all your jobs make sure that it's accurate with your document though. Having a presence there, even lightly, could be helpful for you to get more job opportunities and get your resume content into more people's eyes.
TAKING CARE OF YOUR RESUME
Ayan: [00:18:16] Definitely. It's a great way to put yourself out there actually. Rather than going towards recruiters, you let them come to you.
So let's imagine I took all of these great tips and put them in place and I landed the job. Does that mean I should put my resume away and say, "Thanks, that was great! I'll see you another time”?
Evan: [00:18:35] Yeah, you have to be be good at your resume. I know from personal experience, I let a couple of years go by. I didn't think about what I was doing. I didn't document anything of what I was doing very well. You can put yourself up to a really painful place if you don't reflect on what you've accomplished.
Just once a year, maybe book a little time for yourself. What did I do this past year? What did I accomplish? Did I get a promotion? Did I get some new award? Did I get a new job? What did I do?
My advice is have a kind of backstage resume. As long as you want it. Has many pages as you'd like. It's a full recounting of everything you've done: the education, certifications, jobs, accomplishments, all these things that we've been talking about. Jot it down, and you'll find over time through a longer career history, you'll have quite a few different accomplishments and things and not all of them you would use in the same job you're targeting.
This is a way that you can actually tailor the resume a little bit without having to rewrite it, is you editorialize, you judiciously pick accomplishments — not jobs, you have to have all the jobs — but the things you've accomplished, you could cherry pick them and pick the ones that best speak to the job you're applying to. And now you have a slightly different resume. He didn't rewrite it. You didn't like have completely different version of it. But by doing that, you also can generate those tailored resumes that will help you get opportunities in the future.
Ayan: [00:19:57] Yeah, I think that goes back to what you had said earlier about adapting. So by having that structure, you don't have to always start from zero and you kind of just take and personalize it based on the opportunity you're applying to.
Evan: [00:20:09] Take heart in that you're doing good by your future self. Don't they say that like, luck is really just opportunity and preparation coming together? So work on the preparation front and you may get lucky.
Ayan: [00:20:21] So I have one more question, Evan, before we bid farewell. For me, resumes are very intimate. As we said earlier, it's a summary of my work experiences, my educational experiences, with also the intimate goal of obtaining a job and hopefully an ideal job that I'm looking for.
Lately I've been looking at people's portfolios just cause I'm participating in a mentorship program. And I saw that some people posted their full resume on their website. What do you think about that? Should be only use our resume when it's serving us a purpose — so direct contact — or can it be used as kind of like a reference point. So if somebody is on my website, I can have my resume there and they can just review it?
Evan: [00:21:00] Well, let's think back to the goal of the resume: the goal of the resume is to communicate that professional and educational knowledge and experience, but it's also to get opportunities. So sure. Why not? Absolutely. Because then, you know what? You may luck into an opportunity by having it there. Now, just remember, keep it up to date. You don't want to have a wildly different document from your LinkedIn, from your professional website, so there is some energy there you have to kind of expend to make sure everything is in harmony, but if you're willing to do that, I think it's a great idea.
Ayan: [00:21:29] Interesting. I always just thought... I'm always afraid that maybe somebody will steal elements from my resume or just cause, I’d rather send it at a point of need rather than just putting it out there, but it makes sense as well. If somebody is on your website, looking at your work, why not take advantage of that attention that they're currently giving you and direct them to also view your resume.
Evan: [00:21:49] Having choices is great. Having opportunities is great, and the more you can get this summarized document out into the world, the more chances you'll you'll get. And also, another advantage of being on the web: you don't have this one-page limitation, really either. It's easier to consume.
Ayan: [00:22:05] One thing I did though on my website is like a summary page of who I am. And at the bottom, I gave a quick summary of the summary of my resume. So without having to give everything, and then I just included logos of the clients that I worked with.
You don't want to put everything out there because you also want to pique interest that the person wants to contact you and continue the conversation from what you put down on paper.
SUMMARY & CLOSING
Evan: [00:22:28] If you just remember the people that you are sending this documentation to, have just a very, very finite short amount of time and attention, and you want to maximize it to the best of your ability. If people internalize that, they're going to do a lot better and they're going to get more opportunity.
So conserve that energy and make it count to the core point that "I am a collaborative person, I get things done, I'm accepting of feedback, and I have a growth mindset. I want to learn and keep growing." And you will find those opportunities. They will come.
Ayan: [00:23:02] Well, thank you, Evan, for sharing your experiences as a hiring manager. I hope it helps our listeners towards refreshing their resume or, just bringing their resume to be its best.
Evan: [00:23:13] Yeah. Thanks. It's been fun. Well, that's going to do it for this episode of the Ascend UX podcast. podcast. We'd love your questions and feedbacks. Send it to ascendux@pros.com. Also rate, follow, subscribe, or leave comments on Apple podcast, Spotify, or whichever service you're using listen to us. We definitely appreciate it!
Ayan: [00:23:29] Thank you guys, and until next time.