In print, what you see is not necessarily what you get. In pictures, what you see is perhaps more credible and interesting. That’s the principle driving more and more employers to look beyond text CVs.
Enter the visual résumé (some folks call it the “visume”). It comes in a variety of flavors – plain video, text and pictures, slideshows with audio and animated short films. The degree of creative freedom often varies with the creativity required in the job that the candidate is pitching for.
Recently, some job portals have started to offer visual résumés as a premium service. Most of these sites allow candidates to host videos in addition to text résumés. The videos act as promos or teasers and provide a link back to the detailed text résumé. Some candidates also make use of YouTube and Vimeo to host video CVs.
Other creative visualizations include Infographic Résumés, which are visual diagrams that use elements such as boxes, arrows, timelines, heatmaps, etc. to depict the professional’s career path, achievements, affiliations and interests. This type of résumé is growing popular with architects and visual thinkers.
Artists and graphic designers also customize the visual résumé to showcase their talents. However, for those who are not artistically proficient but would still like to create a visual résumé, there are other options.
Services such as SlideShare enable users to host presentations composed of embedded images and video. With a little creativity, candidates can create rich PowerPoint presentations and host them as visual CVs.
A number of online services enable job-seekers to compose profiles by integrating and mashing up content from various sources.
A visual résumé also offers the recruiter a reasonably accurate picture of a candidate’s confidence levels. To be effective, a visual CV must be brief and focused. Include work samples and enrich your story with charts and graphs in addition to audio, video and images.
For some employers, visual CVs are useful to streamline the recruitment procedure. By eliminating a step between scanning the CV and assessing the candidate in a personal interview, recruiters save time and devote their attention to focused candidate search.
Although visual CVs offer great potential to creative job-seekers as they enter the recruitment market, the text CV will by no means be replaced. Being easier to archive and retrieve, the text format is still preferred by the majority of employers. However, as hiring policies change, visual résumés will have a greater role to play in getting the right people in the right careers.
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