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2023’s Ultimate Guide to Using Infographic Resumes with Templates
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How to Make an Infographic Resume
Before we can look at the creative design elements that can elevate your resume, we have to build a solid foundation. No resume will be effective without these essential building blocks.
1.
Contact information: This includes your name, professional-sounding email, phone number, and maybe a profile photo.
2.
Summary statement: This is your elevator pitch. Use one to two accomplishments to explain why you’re an ideal candidate.
3.
Skills and strengths: List your areas of expertise.
4.
Work experience: List your relevant work history, including achievements for previous employers.
5.
Education: List your relevant degrees, training and certifications.
Once you have this structure and a general outline of your essential information, you can flex your creativity and create graphs, charts and images that showcase your range of work skills. The infographic resume design should rely more on images in the form of ranked graphs for your qualifications, infographic timelines that illustrate your work history, or work samples than on written text to tell your professional story.
You can make your points visual with several features, including:
- A timeline
- A headshot
- Personal, but professional, logo
- Icons
- Tag cloud
- Headlines
- Tagline
- Statistics
- Quotes/testimonials/published mentions
A well-designed infographic resume should have a clear purpose, making it easy for viewers to understand the story you want to tell. Here are a few elements to include in your infographic resume design:
1.
Clear to follow. The potential employer should be able to find your name, contact information, work experience, education background and skills without confusion or distraction. These details stand out immediately without following a traditional resume format. Remember that a viewer’s eye will go from left to right, so the infographic resume design should allow that to happen naturally.
2.
Makes a quick impression. If the employer can’t understand your resume within 10 seconds, they’ll likely toss it. The display should be neat and straightforward, catching the viewer’s eye in a positive way. While an infographic resume allows for more creativity, professionalism should never be compromised.
3.
Tells a story. While a traditional resume will have similar information, the goal of an infographic resume should be to visually tell the story of your career and career objective in a way that shows an employer why you’re the ideal candidate for the position. The story should easily convey who you are and what you do.
4.
Appears simple. Less is more when it comes to graphics. The appearance of your resume is crucial and should look professional by all accounts. Every image included should make a point, highlighting your relevant work experience and best qualities as a job candidate.
5.
Uses color wisely. It’s easy to get carried away with the color scheme in an infographic resume — you don’t want to overwhelm or distract the viewer. Using the right colors can work to your advantage, so strike an appealing balance between three to five colors. There’s a whole psychology behind color schemes and the human brain, showing that certain color schemes align with specific traits. For example, blue is commonly used on resumes because this color scheme is associated with trust, dependability and strength. These are qualities that every hiring manager looks for. For more resume resources check out these free resume templates to download.
Pros and Cons of an Infographic Resume Template
While infographic resumes are effective for the right employer, they’re not meant for every industry. Even job seekers in marketing can benefit from a more visual resume because they are showing creativity in how to market themselves to the employer.
Pros of an infographic resume
- The employer gets the information they need as well as the bonus of seeing your creativity at work.
- Straying from the traditional resume format allows you to show your personality and design sensibility. If an employer is looking for a creative individual to fill a position, an infographic resume is a great idea because it acts as a sample of your work, whereas a traditional resume may limit you from showing your unique talent.
- Infographic resumes come in handy at in-person networking events. Job seekers can share their infographic resume and the employer is able to digest the visual information much quicker in the moment than a paragraph-form resume.
- Infographic resumes are great for job seekers in a creative industry or profession. If you’re a developer, web designer or writer, this format is right up your alley.
Cons of an infographic resume
- Some professions — like law or healthcare — will always want to see a more traditional resume. Stick to the black-and-white formatted professional resume designs for the more conservative professions.
- Very tricky to strike a balanced and professional look with an infographic resume. The abundance of colors, pictographs, images and font choices can quickly overwhelm a design and make it difficult for hiring managers to read.
- Unfriendly to applicant tracking systems (ATS). These programs are increasingly used by employers to evaluate candidates before resumes reach human eyes. ATS are coded to scan and parse simple designs and layouts, making the infographic resume a risky choice if you don’t have a personal lead or connection within the company.
Alternate Forms of Infographic Resumes
1. Online resumes
Although an infographic resume can be very effective in specialized cases, you can also strike a balance transferring these detailed graphics to an online resume and attaching a hyperlink to a simplified resume.
A simplified resume is more likely to pass an ATS, and if it impresses a hiring manager they’re more likely to click on your online resume to learn more. The transferred infographics can continue to illustrate your creative and professional qualifications –– they’ll just perform that function further into the candidate process.
2. Creative resumes
Creative resumes are the simpler cousins to infographic resumes. They share the same expansive use of colors but opt for the use of defined borders, experimental fonts and specialized font treatments to highlight your resume’s contents.
Our library of creative resumes offer a set of templates that can showcase your innovative thought process in a ATS-friendly format.
3. Portfolio resumes
Resting between creative and infographic resumes, the portfolio resume demonstrates your professional qualifications and candidacy by showcasing real-world examples on your resume.
Like the infographic resume, this format performs best if you have a direct referral for a job opening or are applying to a smaller company, as the inclusion of images makes this design trickier for ATS programs to successfully scan.
Customer Reviews
Infographic Resume FAQ
Are infographic resumes effective?
As we mentioned earlier, an infographic resume can be highly effective under the right circumstances. The bold use of color and illustrated graph can creatively showcase your abilities and demonstrate your uniqueness.
However, this design works best in direct handoffs. The reliance on infographics and reduced use of written content makes it tricky for job search programs to correctly parse your data and accurately rank your candidacy.
What are the advantages of an infographic resume?
Think of your infographic resume design as a portfolio piece. The advantages of a more visual resume helps ensure that an employer will remember you.
1.
You can use creative infographics to highlight the most important aspects that you want employers to see, such as graded skills in marketing, branding, writing, presentation and social media.
2.
You have the freedom and flexibility to represent your skills in a way that comes naturally to you with your infographic resume design.
Do infographic resumes pass ATS?
Unfortunately, infographics are too heavily designed to pass typical ATS programs. ATS are coded to scan and parse highly templated and conventional resumes –– the heavy use of images, visual graphs, and ranked charts may result in a poorly analyzed document.
We strongly advise you only use an infographic resume if you’re applying via any of the following situations, as they are less likely to rely on these programs:
- Applying to a small company of less than 15 employees
- Applying with an internal referral
- Applying through a recruitment agency
- Physically handing your resume to a hiring manager
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