Resume Guidelines for Designers

Throughout 2022, I was on the hunt for a new job, and during that time, I continuously iterated on my resume to consistently improve it. Along the way, I compiled a list of tips for writing an effective resume. These tips, initially personal notes, were on a Notion page I shared with a few designers I talked to. I recently discovered that my notes were shared on a designers' community and some found them useful. So I’ve decided to publish these tips to help designers looking for jobs right now.

How your resume will be consumed

Let’s start with these two considerations:

• 🤖 Your resume will most likely be analyzed first by an ATS machine. So you have to keep this in mind when writing and editing your resume: the machine comes first, and then if the resume passes this step, it will be reviewed by a human. Only a small percentage of resumes pass the ATS filter.
• ⏰ Recruiters spend an average time of 8 seconds on your resume: this means that your resume must deliver the most important information immediately and easily.

Resume structure and contents

You are a designer and you should think of your resume as a design product. The customer in this case is the recruiter. Use your designer mindset to think at your resume in terms of usability and user experience, and iterate on it as you would do with any product you designed in the past.

Some basic guidelines:

• Simple layout: think about your resume in terms of maximum usability. Keep the structure simple. Basic info on top. Then two columns.
• Work experience: Work experience is the most important part of your resume. Place it on the left and in the larger column column (remember the F-shape pattern?). Use the smaller column (on the right) for the secondary information.
• Clear sections: don’t reinvent the wheel and stick to the sections that the recruiter is expecting: “Work experience” (or “Experience”), “Education”, “Certifications”, “Skills”, and “Spoken languages”.
• Heading titles: Identify each section with its title. Make the titles easily recognizable, so that the recruiter can identify them when scanning your resume, and jump from one section to the other.
• Picture, basic info, and contacts: No picture: it is not necessary. Add the city and country where you live (no full address). Add your contacts: phone, email, LinkedIn profile, Portfolio (if you’re a designer). Links should be active so that the recruiter can easily click on them.
• Bullet lists: to make the contents easily scannable (by the ATS and the human) use bullet points.
• Short paragraphs: Since nobody is going to spend hours reading your resume, keep each paragraph short. Summarise what you want to say in short, effective sentences.
• 1 Page or 2: Go for 1 Page. If you have a very long experience (20+ years) you can make it 2 pages.
• Impact and achievements: While recruiters scan very quickly you resume they would like to see the impact of your work (using the formula “Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y] by doing [Z]” is a plus). This will help the recruiter understand that you are a business-minded designer and you’re not just pushing pixels.
• No mistakes: Avoid mistakes and typos. Copy/Paste the text in Grammarly and look for errors.
• Keywords: Your resume should contain and highlight some keywords that are strictly related to the job offer. This will help the recruiter understand if you are a good fit for that position. Keywords must be in bold to help the recruiter spot them.

Software to write the resume

I suggest using Adobe InDesign to write your resume. Some recruiters suggest using Microsoft Word but that’s too much for me 🤯.

Compared to Illustrator, InDesign allows you to have better bullet points, hypertextual links, and better management of styles.

Compared to Figma, In Design produces smaller PDF files that are (probably) better understood by ATS machines.

Typography

As designers, we are tempted to select a nice-looking font for our resume but ATS systems can get confused with fonts. I suggest using simple fonts. I used Arial, Helvetica and Inter.

Fine-tune the resume for each job opening

I suggest customizing your resume for each job offer. A few guidelines here:

1. Job Position: The headline in your resume should correspond to the job position of the opening. I.e: if you’re applying for a position as “Product Designer”, copy/paste “Product Designer” under your name in your resume.
2. Spot keywords in the job description: On the job opening page, highlight the most relevant keywords. I use Pundit, a Chrome extension that allows you to easily highlight parts of the text on the page.
3. Review your resume — add keywords: Make a copy of your resume file. I usually add a new version number and something like “_<COMPANY_NAME>” at the end of the filename. Review the keywords you highlighted in the job opening with Pundit, and insert (copy/paste) them into your resume. This will take a while. You’ll have to review the text of the resume to be sure it responds to what is required in the job opening (→ it includes the keywords).
4. Keywords in bold: keywords should be in bold, this will help the recruiter spot them, and understand that you’re the right person for the position.
5. Ready to go!: Once you’ve inserted all the keywords in your resume, you’re ready to submit it 🚀

Tools to review your resume

There are a lot of tools out there, these are the ones I used.

Automatic tools:

• https://www.jobscan.co/
• https://resumeworded.com/

Human tools:

• https://www.zipjob.com/ (you’ll interact with an actual writer)

Conclusions

I hope these guidelines will help you design a better resume, that will make the recruiter’s life easier, and will help you land you're dream job 🌟. Last but not least, you should consider looking for mentors on ADP List and ask them to review your resume and portfolio. ADP List is a free service and it’s incredibly valuable if you’re looking for your next job.