Snag an Interview with a Visual Resume

Unless you're a real rock star in your chosen field, it can be hard to make your resume stand out from the crowd. Certainly, it can help to take some of our excellent resume-writing advice, but at the end of the day, you've got yet another page full of lists, in a stack with everyone else's page full of lists. Extreme times call for extreme measures -- you might consider producing a visual resume.

Digital Inspirations recently published a collection of visual resumes for your browsing pleasure.

Essentially, visual resumes are PowerPoint decks stacked with resume-like information, presented visually, in a more engaging manner than you traditionally get on a piece of paper. Don't just say where you're from, for example -- show a photo. Here's an example:

I think there are a couple of important caveats, though.

• Visual resumes do not replace a traditional resume. In my experience, most HR wonks don't have the time, patience, or inclination to click through a PowerPoint deck -- they want to scan your resume for certain keywords and are have allocated about 20 seconds for that job. The harder you make their job (and a visual resume definitely falls into the harder category) the less likely you'll be to get past the very initial resume screen.
• A visual resume is for the hiring manager -- it's a way to differentiate yourself after you get one foot in the door, and you've progressed from HR to the dude who's actually hiring you. This person has a very sensitive "gimmick" detector. So prune out goofy, gimmicky stuff like visual puns (check out slides 13-16 in the example above, for instance).