The résumé isn’t just for Microsoft Word anymore. With #CareerGravity, you can do all sorts of cool, bleeding-edge things with your résumé. Social media, especially the visually-oriented destinations (e.g., Pinterest), give you a wide berth to exercise creativity and innovation in how you interpret the idea of a résumé and present it to the world. This past week, I happened across an interesting take on the evolution of the résumé, and toward the end of this blog entry, I’ll share an overview. But first, let’s flesh out the supposed death of the résumé. …
Death on Celluloid and Online
We’ve talked here about how the résumé is dying a long, slow, agonizing death. That death is kind of like the deaths you see in classic movies, the ones in which overacting actors and actresses act out long, slow, agonizing deaths before a camera trained on their every move, till their last gasps for breath.
Actually, the résumé’s death is more like the death of a horror movie’s villain or monster. The antagonist in these movies is never really dead, and the Friday the 13th franchise provides a real-life caricature of the tried-and-true (and tired-and-true) formula. Often, that antagonist comes back to life several scenes following his or her (or its) supposed death.
Take the scenario and apply it to the résumé, but without the horror aspect. Imagine a movie in which a supporting character dies and comes back to life. It’s not a huge deal, maybe even a bit boring. But there the bad guy or monster remains, and there the résumé remains, too, alive to see another job search. …
Résumé Powers, Activate! Change into the Form of…an Infographic
This time around, settling into its latest new lease on life, the résumé is taking on many new forms, and one new form of interest works for Pinterest and other image-sharing social media sites. Joshua Waldman, author of “Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies,” provided a useful step-by-step walk-through, as a guest blogger on blogging4jobs.com last week, of how to create an infographic résumé. In the meantime, here’s the gist:
Catching on across industry is the concept of the infographic. Check out the example, to your left. As the name implies, an infographic is an image of information. Effective infographics tell a concise, cogent story, usually through numbers and facts accompanied by illustrative, complementary images of all kinds, all meshed into one image file that can take up a page’s worth of space. The natural progression is to create an infographic out of a résumé; the result is a visual adaptation of your curriculum vitae. Your career is a story, which a picture—i.e., an image or graphic—tells, and one of the benefits of social media is how it facilitates your telling of the story of your career. #CareerGravity is our term for your use of the vast online landscape, a tool that, wielded properly, can transform the story of you into a multidimensional tale. The infographic resume fits into #CareerGravity, to add another dimension to your professional brand.
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