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Creative Resume Template: Pros And Cons
Creative Resume Cons
Not-ATS friendly: An ATS usually has trouble with creative design elements such as graphics and tables. Therefore, it won’t scan your resume properly and it may be removed from consideration.
Personal taste: In the end, the reader of your resume may not like what they see. To be safe, you can also use a resume from our collection of professional templates.
Creative Resume Pros
Highlight key sections: Creative resumes highlight your resume’s most critical parts with design elements such as bold lettering and shades of color.
Show your creativity: Especially for graphic designers, web designers, and artists, a creative resume is a great way to demonstrate your skills.
Stand out: If your design is unique and engaging, your resume will have a visual impact that can leave a lasting impression.
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Helping Job Seekers Like You
Creative Resumes FAQ
Updated: January 02, 2025
Yes, creative resume templates can help you craft a resume that showcases your qualifications in an engaging manner. A unique design could help you stand out against a sea of simple or basic resumes.
To make a creative resume you will want a well-designed and well-formatted document with bold design elements helps direct the reader’s attention to your most important capabilities.
To achieve a professional, appealing and organized design, consider the following tips:
- Clear margins: Use 1-inch margins on your resume. The whitespace provides a visual break between blocks of text, which helps the reader effectively absorb information.
- Readable fonts: A familiar font like Times New Roman, Arial or Helvetica in size 10-12 makes your resume easy to read.
- Color:There’s nothing wrong with submitting a resume in black and white, but if you’re applying for a highly desired job, it’s easy for your document to get lost in the sea of similar formats. Adding pops of color can help your resume stand out. We advise that you use the entry-level rule of color theory and only use three to five colors on your document. Remember, the white of your margins and black of your text count as colors.
- Borders: Your margins and paragraph breaks can indicate when and where a resume section starts and ends, but you can add additional clues in the form of borders. These small markers can send visual cues to the hiring manager, making it a lot easier to scan your resume.
Choosing a creative resume should depend on the job. You are more likely to use a creative resume if you work in a creative industry like tech, advertising, marketing, customer service, child care or education.
Make sure to research the job opening. Is there a use of humor in the job posting? Does the company website emphasize employee activities and company culture? Is their social media peppered with playful posts? If so, you can safely assume these employers might appreciate a creative resume
If you’re not sure, we highly recommend that you use one of our alternate resumes:
- Basic: These designs are anything but basic. These elegant templates build on a standard layout and add subtle design elements that can help you out.
- Contemporary: Our bold take on a standard resume, these templates lean into a multi-column approach and use section borders to make your skills, experience and education stand out.
- Simple: These clean and simple templates help you elevate your resume by combining thoughtful font choices, crisp margins, and special header treatment on each of your resume sections.
There are other innovative ways to showcase your creativity through a job application. These include:
- Online resumes: Online resumes allow you to play with the format and talk about your achievements through alternative styles like photographs, illustrations, graphs or timelines.
- Video resume:Although unconventional, video resumes are an audio/visual representation of your qualifications. They can be an excellent tool for cinematographers, video editors or other creators to demonstrate their skills.
- Infographic resumes: The infographic resume uses a visual format to provide information about you and your experience. Check out our infographic resume guide and templates to make the job easy for you.
- Portfolio resumes: Portfolio resumes help you demonstrate your work experience with examples of your work. We have a library of free portfolio templates and additional writing tips.
