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Why do résumés have to be so boring?

Sure, if it's your first job out of college and you're applying to a placement firm to be scanned, processed, indexed by keyword and forwarded to an HR department that has to flip through 700 virtually identical résumés to find the top candidates for an initial round of interviews, yes, there's a great argument for meeting the traditional expectations for how a résumé should be formatted.

However, if you're sending a résumé to someone that you actually expect will give you a few moments to consider your life history, why not make their job easier by punching it up a bit? I'm not referring to emoticons ("gr8 job, under nda tho :-X") or unnecessary graphics. Instead, I'm advocating the judicious use of color, shading, tables and spacing to communicate critical information on a single page.

Ever since attending Cornell to study Japanese, I've had a real problem trying to create a linear narrative on my résumé. For me, learning Japanese was a long-term investment in learning how to speak and read the language of one of the world's largest and most dynamic economies having one of the world's most fascinating cultures. However, from a domestic recruiter's standpoint, my language education sent the signal: "Hire this guy and six months later he's out of here." In fact, my first editor at Bank Systems & Technology indeed thought that I wouldn't stick around for long. Fortunately, I was hired anyway, and I stayed with the company for over six years.

Now, it's even more complicated. For the past few years I've been going to school at night towards a master's degree in foreign literature and culture, and I've also taken some IT classes. Then, I briefly joined the IT department at CMP, the publishers of Bank Systems & Technology. Even though it all makes sense in the context of my goals and abilities, the résumé itself became disjointed, hard to explain, and way too much for a single page.

This posed an interesting design challenge, which I solved by borrowing a page from the world of print magazines.

First, I created a four-column grid. The first column was for dates, and the next three columns correspond to the categories of "Business," "Technology," and "International." For each date range, I indicated how my activities aligned with these categories, merging cells where appropriate. For the palette, I went with colors evocative of LinkedIn.

Now, the story's much clearer. I started out as a techie, went to business school, added a year of language study, put it all together for a stint, and then returned to the USA, etc.

By demonstrating depth across related subject areas, the format also lends credence to my stated goal of "Seeking profitable opportunities to create and manage global Web 2.0 communities."

You can download the PDF here.

Now, I just have to add rounded corners to make it look right at home with the Web 2.0 aesthetic.

Labels: résumé