50 Shades Of Resume #3: The Infographic

Resume 3

Next up in 50 Shades of Resume is an infographic resume from Martin Suster.

Martin’s resume goes landscape instead of portrait, and he uses the extra space to take an infographic approach to his career. It actually includes a lot of standard resume elements – skills, job history, hobbies – but in a different format. He tops it off with a simple, limited color palette, which is useful as it keeps it from being garish.

The high points of resume are:

  • It actually mixes standard resume elements with the info graphic approach, and can mostly be viewed either way.
  • The listing of the skills is actually very effective as it combines both a measure of abilities and general classifications to make it easy to read.
  • The use of the icons adds a nice, subtle bit of personality to the resume. This is something people could use on a variety of resumes.
  • A limited color palette keeps this from being garish.
  • The landscape layout allows this to be an effective one-pager.
  • There’s a good sense of “quantifying” here and of self-awareness. Despite it being a resume that uses an info graphic, I feel it’s about a person.

The limits of this resume, and suggested alterations:

  • On the skills, I’d list them in the order of ability from most to least ability, so there’s more symmetry.
  • Not sure the job history works. It could probably be reconfigured to give it more space.
  • The education graph is clever, but could probably be a bit smoother, going for a simple timeline.
  • It’s not a resume that’ll necessarily scan well. It’s probably well paired with a more regular resume – it looks great online or as part of a set of resumes.
  • This would go well paired with a regular resume – it’s a good, powerful personal snapshot.

Steve’s Summary: If I got this resume it gives me a sense of a person with a good sense of design and a real sense of self-awareness. I’d want some more job history though, and possibly a regular resume.

[“50 Shades of Resume” is an analysis of various interesting resumes to celebrate the launch of the second edition of my book “Fan To Pro” and to give our readers inspiration for their own unique creations.]

– Steven Savage