Creative Resumes Land Jobs

There I was with no job in a bad economy. Everyone was saying "if you have a job, hold onto it!" My problem of course was that I did not have a precious job, but I needed one ... bad. I watched the craigslist postings daily trying to find opportunities. Maybe once a week I would see something that I actually wanted to apply for and maybe once a month I saw a listing for a place I could actually see myself working.

I was looking for an internet marketing job so I thought it would be only natural to apply marketing principles to my job search. The first thing I did was a little competitive research. I created a job listing on craigslist describing the sort of job I wanted and invited people to send in their resumes. What discouraged me most was not the sheer number of resumes I received (probably 40 in 48 hours) but how many of them were far more qualified than me.

I was looking at people who had marketing degrees from good schools, MBAs, and a lot more experience. The one thing I really noticed, though, was that all the resumes looked exactly the same: drab and boring. If I was hiring I would hate to go through all of those. In fact, I didn't even look at them all because I was so bored after the first few.

What I learned from all this was that I was going to need to do something to make me stand out. My experience in the field is pretty good and well rounded, but my higher education and lack of a history of prestigious job titles wasn't going to help at all.

Since I like designing things more than I like looking for jobs, I set out to make a creative resume. Something that would stand out above the rest despite my shortcomings. I needed something that said "I can do this job" (and I can) just by looking at it.

I went through maybe five or six completely different versions before I settled on this:

I sent this out to exactly one place before I got an interview which ultimately landed me a job - a really cool job that I'm actually excited about. I believe that the look of my resume is 100% responsible for landing me that first interview.