HOW TO: Create your own infographic resume

Posted by
September 5, 2011
“We believe that the traditional text resume is boring, lengthy and long overdue for a makeover. We are creating an online resume format that is beautiful, relevant and fun. We want to enable people to express their professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization. Our vision is to […]

“We believe that the traditional text resume is boring, lengthy and long overdue for a makeover. We are creating an online resume format that is beautiful, relevant and fun. We want to enable people to express their professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization. Our vision is to become the future of resumes. We live and breathe our work and love our jobs.” – Vizualize.me

I was eagerly waiting for my beta-invite from Vizualize.me and received it recently. My expectations were high and must say they have delivered on that. I’m impressesed by how easy it is to create a beautiful infographic resume that utilise graphs, charts and mult–coloured tabs to tell your story. What you need is a complete LinkedIn profile to get started. You allow Vizualize.me to import your LinkedIn profile so you have a draft version of a graphic presentation of your CV. Next steps are to fully customise your profile by:

 

  1. 3 theme options
  2. Edit your data
  3. Display/Hide sections
  4. Upload a background image
  5. Change fonts and colors
  6. Claim a vanity URL e.g. http://vizualize.me/jacco

Have a look at the result of this in my Viz CV:

I’ve used my company style for the colors so its consistent across various online websites and platforms. And when you hover over a job title in my online Viz CV, more information becomes visible.

Is it the future of resumes? Not really. This is not the first service that promises this. VisualCV and also LinkedIn (Resume Builder) have created similar tools in the past. Personally, I wouldn’t receive a job application like this because it’s not really creative (it’s 15 minutes of work with the help of this online tool) and takes me too much time to read if I need more detail. However, I think for personal branding or to pimp a personal website it’s a great addition because its beautiful and short. That’s certainly an added value that Vizualize.me delivers and for this reason I can understand the very positive reviews they already received.

What do you think, would you accept a Vizualize.me infographic resume from job seekers?

About Jacco Valkenburg

Jacco Valkenburg is an international recruitment expert, trainer and author (5 books). He has more than 20 years experience in global recruitment strategies and execution spanning numerous countries for leading companies. As founder of Recruiter University and Recruit2 he provides companies with recruitment training and consultancy. His mission is helping companies ‘from good to great staffing’.

6 Comments

  1. Bill Wynn
    Posted September 13, 2011 at 11:11 AM

    I think the CV format looks good, it is attention grabbing and if I received one like this I would interview off the back of it.

    During the interview I would explore more.

  2. Joel Garner
    Posted November 2, 2011 at 4:03 AM

    It seems to be a good trend to have now. Yes, a picture is worth thousand words. I also stumbled on a new site called http://www.pictocv.com. It is very promising to see these new companies coming up with creative ideas.

  3. Shaun
    Posted November 25, 2011 at 1:36 AM

    Hi Jacco

    You might also want to look at – the modern way to resumé. [disclosure – I’m the founder of curv.me]

    Phase 1 (resumés) is live and you can check it out at curv.me.

    Phase 2 is being built for recruiters. It will be live early 2012 and recruiters can register their interest at http://curv.me/recruiters-beta/ – the first 2,500 recruiters to register will not only get in first, but they’ll also receive great discounts at launch.

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