The Rise of The Mobile Resume
Caileen Kehayas | Career, Job Search, Mobile, Tech, Work
| ByIn Donna Svei’s “Why Your Fancy Resume is So 2015,” the executive resume writer explores why “fancy” resumes are a thing of the past.
After asking a large group of recruiters whether or not they read resumes on their mobile devices, Svei learned that an overwhelming 88% of recruiters reported that they indeed did.
In speaking of the dreaded “2015 Resume,” Svei adds, “You can mark 2015 as the year your resume moved off the desktop, laptop, and notebook and onto the phone.”
The Rise of The Mobile Resume
So what does this mean?
In short, it means that all the fancy-schmancy graphic elements that you have been told to include to make your resume stand out are obsolete on mobile devices.
This includes charts, colored backgrounds, shading, columns, graphs, sidebars, multiple fonts, and multiple colors.
Instead, you will want to make your resume easily readable by making it high contrast (read: black and white!), using sans serif fonts, limiting the resume to one column, and making sure any blocks of texts do not exceed four lines.
To sum up, Donna Svei’s advice is to make your resume readable and informative for a recruiter doing a “quick scan” of it from their mobile device. It is best to keep information relevant, recent and neatly formatted. Your pertinent information should be easily digestible. A recruiter waiting for a graph or visual elements to load will be prone to instead move on to the next resume.
Bring your resume into 2016 by following these guidelines!
Infographic by Caileen Kehayas at Proven.
This is really fantastic. Finally an infographic that’s actually helpful.
What a great infographic and article! Thanks Caileen!
Excellent piece! I’ve been writing resumes professionally for many years, and I never followed the trend to graphic intensive resumes – for several reasons. When I was recruiting, the highly complex, highly formatted, multiple column, resumes that would cross my desk simply made my head hurt. It was too difficult to figure what actually happened. Bottom line? The story got lost in the cool graphics. But it’s the story that matters. It’s what a candidate has done that will get the interview – not a complex presentation. And in the days of mobile? That’s even more clear. Simplicity and clarity really are more valuable than flash – in resumes as in life.