Artful Ruckus - Graphic Design Resume Design Tips

Graphic Design Resume Tips to Get You HIRED

Trying to find a new design job and tired of getting ghosted? These graphic design resume tips are sure to get you more callbacks, more interviews, and help you get hired.

Video Script

Have you been applying to design job after design job, but can’t get so much as a call back?

You may not realize this, but your resume only has 7.4 seconds to prove your value to a hiring manager before they move on to the next candidate.

As an Art Director, I’ve seen hundreds of graphic designer resumes over the years that make the same common mistakes that get them tossed in the ‘no pile’.

If you want to create the PERFECT resume that helps you stand out from the crowd and get more interviews, then you’re gonna want to stick around until the end of this one.

Okay so the topic I see asked about the most when it comes to graphic design resumes is the design itself.

As creatives, we should be showcasing our artistic skillset and building a flashy resume with lots of graphics, charts, and images. Right?

Wrong.

While it’s tempting to show off your design skills at every opportunity, the exciting visuals are better left in your portfolio.

The goal of your resume should be to quickly portray information, focusing on legibility and clarity. With this in mind, my first tip to create the perfect graphic design resume is to keep it simple.

Think about it, before a hiring manager even looks at your design work, they want to know that you have the experience, skillset, and qualifications to do the job.

That’s not to say you should just use the default Microsoft Word template, but rather that your résumé’s design should be based on solid fundamentals – hierarchy, typography, layout, and grid.

Your resume is a great opportunity to show restraint and highlight your mastery of the foundations of good design.

Studies have shown that resumes with clear hierarchy and easy-to-scan layouts perform better and have a higher average view time than those that are cluttered or have too many embellishments.

That means no skillset pie charts, no headshots, and please, please don’t include those software mastery sliders.

On top of performing better with hiring managers, simplifying your resume design will also help achieve better results with automated ATS scans.

If you haven’t heard of ATS before, it stands for Applicant Tracking Software. It’s essentially an AI scanning tool that a lot of HR departments use to weed out unqualified candidates.

With many design jobs receiving hundreds or thousands of applicants, ATS scans are a quick way for HR teams to narrow things down, producing a list of the best matches.

The problem ATS presents is that it can get confused if your resume design is too complex, your layout is non-standard, or if you don’t use the correct keywords.

So, how do you know if your resume will play nice with an ATS? Luckily there are a number of free and paid tools online that will scan your resume and highlight areas that can be improved. A couple that I recommend are:

Each ATS is a bit different, so be sure to test your resume in a few tools to see how it performs. You can then make updates and re-upload to verify that you’re heading in the right direction.

Okay, so now that we’ve covered the overarching design of your resume, let’s jump into the content.

Off the bat, one of the most essential parts of a resume that I shockingly see left out all too often is a header.

Right at the top of your resume you should very clearly have your name, your desired job title, a link to your portfolio, your email address, your phone number, and optionally a link to your LinkedIn page if you keep it up to date and think it adds value.

This is resume design 101, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to search all over a resume to track down a candidate’s portfolio link or their email address – really frustrating.

Another best practice here is to make sure that your portfolio address is an actual, clickable link. Making a hiring manager copy and paste the portfolio address into their web browser is adding unnecessary friction to the process.

You want to leave a great first impression with your resume and show that you sweat the small stuff, so spending the extra time making sure your resume’s UX is seamless is always worth it.

Now that we have a professional header, what’s next? The next section we’ll talk about is a professional summary.

While this section is optional depending on how much content you have to fit onto your resume, I think it makes a big impact.

Since we know that hiring managers will only spend a few seconds reviewing each resume, a summary section at the top is a great way to provide an elevator pitch and sell them on why you’re a great fit for their company.

So what does a successful summary section look like?

  • Keep it brief, 3-4 short sentences is all you need.
  • Highlight key career accomplishments supported by tangible numbers and metrics.
  • Make it obvious that you have experience doing this type of work and that you’d be a good fit for the role.
  • Write using keywords found in the job description, but don’t force it.

The hiring manager should finish reading your summary and think ‘wow this person sounds like they’d be a perfect fit, they’ve done this before and they have a proven track record of success’.

The next area we’ll focus on makes up the bulk of your resume, the Experience section.

This section has a similar goal as the summary – to drive home your accomplishments and skills while showing you’re a great fit for the role.

The difference here is that it’s an opportunity to get a bit more granular, providing additional context and accomplishments.

First let’s look at WHAT you should include in a successful Experience section:

  • List your job title, the company, and the years worked for each role
  • List jobs in chronological order
    • Provide more detail for recent, relevant positions and less detail for old or unrelated jobs. Once you have enough experience, you can leave off old unrelated jobs altogether.
  • If you don’t have much (or any) work experience relating to the position you’re applying to, you can include related volunteer positions, school projects, certifications, or side projects. While it may not be as impactful as relevant full time positions, it shows you’re passionate about the line of work and is a lot better than nothing.

Now that we’ve covered WHAT to include, here are some tips on HOW to write about your work experience:

  • Use bullet points rather than paragraphs to keep things short and to the point
  • Make sure your resume is scannable, as hiring managers may not read everything word for word
  • Focus on high level, impactful accomplishments – providing metrics whenever possible.
    • Highlight the results, not the role
    • Relevant examples might include the percentage you increased revenue year over year, the amount of social engagements received on a campaign you led, or a measurable increase in asset output.
  • Use active voice and action verbs when writing accomplishments
    • My project management skillset significantly increased team output efficiency
    • Launched a new project management workflow that increased the creative team’s deliverable output by 15%.
  • Align content with the job you want
    • Applying for a creative leader position? Then you should highlight accomplishments that speak to your achievements as a leader – things like award winning campaigns, revenue generation, and increasing team output.
    • Review a handful of job postings for the job you want and look for recurring job requirements, skills, and keywords. Use that research to tailor your resume content. Make it obvious to the hiring manager that you can do the job.

So now you have an easily scannable experience section that’s impactful and to the point, but there are still a few more important sections you’ll want to include in your resume.

Okay so the next section we’re going to talk about is the software or tools section.

You don’t need to go into too much detail here, as this section is basically just a ‘checkbox’ for the hiring manager so they know you can use the software they use on the job.

As mentioned before, there’s no need to include a granular breakdown of your skill level for each program here – it’s TMI.

Just list the programs that you’re comfortable with that are relevant to the job.

So for a graphic design position, you might include things like Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Microsoft Office, Keynote, and Trello.

Be sure to leave off any programs that you don’t have a solid grasp of, as you don’t want to misrepresent your skillset only to find out that you’re expected to be an expert in a program you’ve only opened once.

The next section you’ll want to include is a soft skills section. This is one that I only see about half the time on the resumes I review, but I think it’s a valuable addition.

This is where you can highlight keywords for non-software related skills such as facilitating workshops, user journey mapping, creating marketing funnels, or creative leadership.

This works as another ‘checkbox’ section that reinforces to the hiring manager (and the ATS system) that you have all of the necessary skills for the job.

Next up, you’ll want to have an education section that briefly highlights where you went to school, what degree you received, and when you graduated.

The info and importance of this section will vary depending on where you’re at in your career.

For example, If you’re fresh out of college, it makes sense to place more emphasis on education – highlighting your GPA, awards you won, and any relevant extracurricular activities.

For designers that are further along in their careers, you can keep this section short and place it at the bottom of your resume – removing all of the extras outside of the school, degree and graduation year.

The last section you might want to include is a References section.

I consider this section optional on a resume, but is definitely something you can include if you have some empty space to fill in.

Whether you decide to include it on your resume or not, you’ll want to have at least 3 references ready to send over to potential employers – ideally past managers and colleagues that think highly of you and can speak to your work ethic, character, and accomplishments.

You should include their name, job title, company, email, phone number, and their relation to you.

Personally, I don’t include references on my resume, but rather send them along in a separate document on request. This lets me give the references a heads up that someone may be reaching out to them and frees up additional room on my resume for the experience and skills sections.

Okay, once you have your resume designed, your sections laid out, and your skimmable copy written complete with tangible metrics – it’s time for one of the most important steps. Proofreading.

No matter how impactful the content of your resume is, if it contains multiple typos or grammar errors, it’s going to leave a poor first impression.

Having spelling mistakes in your portfolio makes it seem like you didn’t take the resume writing process seriously or that you don’t have a keen eye for detail – something that’s obviously very important in the design profession.

Luckily, typos and grammar mistakes are easy problems to fix.

First, run your resume text through a couple of writing programs to check for correctness such as Microsoft Word and Grammarly.

Second, be sure to re-read the entire resume multiple times. I recommend reading through it on different days as you’re more likely to catch errors with fresh eyes.

Finally, send your resume to a few grammatically gifted friends, family members, and colleagues to ask them to do a proofreading pass.

Getting a second set of eyes to read through it is important as they may catch grammatical errors that weren’t even on your radar in the first place. We’re creatives, not English majors after all.

At this stage, your resume should be in great shape and it’s time to think about how you’ll export and distribute the file.

For most resumes, I recommend exporting as a compressed PDF. This will allow you to have clickable links, accurate colors and layout, and is a file type that pretty much all ATS and HR teams can handle.

One thing to pay attention to with PDFs is making sure you’re using compression settings that get the file size down (ideally less than 500kb), while not causing any quality issues.

I find the default export settings in Adobe InDesign work well for this with jpeg image compression set to high quality. Since we didn’t use any images it should be a small file, my resume PDF is 50kb for instance.

Once you have your resume file exported, make sure to change the file name to ‘First Name, Last Name Resume’. This way the hiring manager will be able to find your resume quickly on their desktop if they’ve downloaded a bunch of other resumes at the same time.

At this stage, I’m confident that you now have a resume that’s impactful, relevant, and will hold the attention of potential employers. If you follow all these tips and STILL aren’t getting call backs, then you can be sure that the problem is either a lack of relevant experience, or your portfolio.

I’ve done a couple of videos where I review dozens of graphic design portfolios, highlighting tons of best practices as well as common mistakes to avoid, so I highly recommend checking those out if you want to create a design portfolio that’s built to get you hired.

I really hope this video was helpful in perfecting your resumes and landing that next design job.

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