Creative Resumes, why they hurt your job search

Just because we have the tools doesn’t mean we are qualified to use them

Creative Resumes

I believe creative resumes hurt most candidates’ chances of receiving a recruiter’s callback. With so many websites and apps that help create websites, these creative resumes are more popular than ever.

I highly doubt these developers have an experienced recruiter on staff helping design the product. 

I was just asked for my opinion on a creative resume template, and I found myself biting my lip. A creative resume may make a good initial impression on the candidate, but the person that matters is the recruiter and the hiring manager. 

As someone in HR, I review resumes every day of the week at scale. My perspective on this topic is the forest view and not the individual tree. When candidates incorporate design into their creative resumes, they often see only a single tree. Their tree.

The “Forest perspective” on creative resumes

When reviewing resumes at scale, you quickly learn the signals of what a good and not-so-good resume looks like.

Most recruiters and hiring managers have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes. Two flags immediately come to mind.

• Because recruiters see so many resumes, it’s easy to spot a candidate who had good intentions but executed poorly.
• When reading documents at scale, you get into a rhythm. You don’t just look for specific information; you expect particular information in specific places within the document.

The right template for the right role

Most of us will not be hired for our design chops, so artistic flair won’t be missed.

Traditional black-and-white resumes are safe and won’t get you in trouble.

Hiring managers are not going to take a look at our resume and say,

“This is the perfect candidate.

I would love to hire them, but their resume lacks aesthetics.”

I have no artistic talent, suck at Adobe Illustrator, Smelly Markers, and the Etch-a-Sketch. This doesn’t worry me because I don’t expect to be hired for my ability to design the Careers page on the company website. My job is to smile and man the booth at a job fair.

If you want to see a beautiful document, look at the resume of an experienced designer or a User Experience professional. These candidates are paid to make visuals that are not only easy to look at but also engaging. These candidates not only studied their craft professionally but also usually have an innate talent for making presentations “easy to look at”.

If this post surfaced more questions, the book “Before the Interview | An Insider’s View of How Resumes Are Interpreted Before Anyone Talks to You” goes deeper into how these and other resume decisions are actually made.

The bar for comparisons is too high

The bar is just too high. Most of us have minimal experience creating resumes, let alone adding aesthetics that engage the reader. Our attempts at flair not only pale in comparison to the design candidate’s resume but also look pathetic. There is a reason you won’t catch me standing next to Brad Pitt or George Clooney in any setting. I don’t want to set myself up for failure by comparison. Reviewing resumes is nothing but comparisons.  

Avoid cookie-cutter templates for your creative resume

Quality, not quantity

If you are thinking about using a cookie-cutter template off the Web, think about this. 

These documents may look clean, but it is usually because they have an abundance of white space. This extra white space could have been used to list relevant accomplishments. Last checked, resumes are for listing accomplishments, not omitting them.

My advice is to opt for a standard black-and-white resume and use a font you are familiar with. When reviewing resumes at scale, I would rather see a well-done resume with a simple format vs. a resume with well-intentioned but poorly executed aesthetics.

First impressions

First impressions make a big difference. The resume and the cover letter are THE first impressions the hiring manager has. The resume stage is where the stakes are the highest. This is the stage where the highest percentage of candidates is declined. Resumes can make any of the following impressions:

Standard resume format done well:

• • Although the hiring manager may not be impressed by the document’s appearance, candidates will not lose points for it. The reader won’t miss beautiful aesthetics if a simple format is executed well. 

Standard resume format with an average look:

• • Even if the resume layout is mediocre, if the content aligns with the job description, I will consider the candidate. If the accomplishments indicate they are qualified, that will be enough. Unless there is a complete lack of consistency in the formatting (which indicates a lack of attention to detail), I won’t be insulted.

Poor attempt to incorporate aesthetics:

• • When we look at anything that is out of balance, it is human nature for internal flags to go off. The painting hung at a crooked angle on the wall makes us feel “off”. This is NOT the state of mind we want a hiring manager to have when reading our document.

I take my own advice

I work in HR, not in the design business. When I started thinking about a logo for this website, I approached our web designer with a bottle of his favorite alcohol as a gesture of appreciation. He was working on graphics for the Indianapolis 500 before joining our company. This guy’s got chops. By his very nature, he is creative 24/7. When he is not creating web designs, he is composing electronic music. He considered the intent of the blog:

• I don’t care for old-school, by-the-book HR
• I wanted to keep my identity out of the picture (so I would have no fear of telling the truth or ostracizing myself from the traditional HR community)

Within 10 minutes, he shared what I think is a brilliant idea and design.

I couldn’t come up with this in a million years!

Much better result

The result is an update on the iconic Banksy painting, Flowers and Peace.  A masked rebel going against convention, throwing the traditional time clock in resentment. Time clocks are used when you don’t trust your employees and need to monitor their work hours. As an HR guy, I would never come up with something even close to this design. This is why I am not in the design field.

If you are considering adding creative elements, remember that your resume will be compared to those of professional designers. 

If you want to make your creative resume catch someone’s attention by adding flair, remember that listing easy-to-read accomplishments that match the job description is what the reader is looking for.

This post explains one signal hiring managers notice.
In the full resume guide, I connect this signal to how resumes are actually read, what it competes with, and when it helps or hurts you.

Check out the book, “Before the Interview, An Insider’s View of How Resumes Are Interpreted Before Anyone Talks to You.”

See you at the after party,

HRNasty

nasty: an unreal maneuver of incredible technique, something that is ridiculously good, tricky, and manipulative but with a result that can’t help but be admired, a phrase used to describe someone good at something. “He has a nasty forkball”.

Ongoing writing and context live on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

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