Review: The Infographic Resume
The Infographic Resume: How to Create a Visual Portfolio That Showcases Your Skills and Lands the Job by Hannah Morgan
My rating: [rating=5]
Summary:
The STANDOUT guide to creating a stunning resume Applying for a job used to require two pieces of paper: a resume and an application. Times have changed.
Infographic resumes are in, and they’re not just for designers. Free online tools are popping up every day to help anyone create a dynamic, visual resume-adding panache without sacrificing substance for style.
“The Infographic Resume” provides essential tips and ideas for how to create visual resumes and portfolios that will make you stand out from the crowd. Richly illustrated in full color and including lots of inspiring examples, the book will teach you how to: Create a powerful digital presence and develop the right digital content for your goals Build your self-brand and manage your online reputation Showcase your best work online Grab a hiring manager’s attention in seconds
Packed with dynamic infographics, visual resumes, and other creative digital portfolios, “The Infographic Resume” reveals the most effective tools, eye-catching strategies, and best practices to position yourself for any job in any kind of business.
Review:
(I received a free copy courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)
To be honest, reviewing and rating non-fiction books is always difficult for me—akin to walking into uncharted territory. I can’t judge them according to my usual standards (plot, atmosphere, characters, etc.), and so I don’t really know what criteria to apply. In the end, for this specific book, I went with “is it going to be useful to me?” The answer is definitely “yes”, considering I’ve been looking to go back to a more creative job than the one I’ve held for the past few years. Is this a biased view? Certainly. Only I have to start somewhere, haven’t I?
The Infographic Resume is a nest of ideas, or at least, of ideas waiting to be born and developed. Not only does it hand out useful advice about what may attract the attention of potential recruiters, it also provides a lot visual examples—alright, this was to be expected, but it still deserves mention. From actual CVs to social networks platforms (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Behance…), job-seeking readers are bound to find something that will help and inspire them.
Maybe some of the job-landing stories in it will seem too good to be true: “the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime, and always to other people, never to me.” Maybe. On the other hand, I must admit that this book sparked renewed interest in me, and prompted me to get my creative joices flowing when it came to reworking my CV after I got a couple of useful comments about it. I can’t remember when was the last time I had so much fun designing something that, all in all, is utilitarian stuff. I really liked the idea of being able to get all gung-ho, all the more because I was growing seriously tired of stale, traditional CVs typed in Word and full of grandiloquent vocabulary that doesn’t mean much anymore in the end. (Hello, French administration CVs. I loathe thee.)
I honestly think the book can provide inspiration to many job-seekers: graphic designers, of course, but also people like me, who are somewhat creative yet not one hundred percent “in it”, and need some prompting before they’re able to unleash their (probably untapped) potential. As for those who don’t have any graphic design software and/or training, the author also provides links to websites where one can enter information (either manually or pulled from LinkedIn and the likes); this won’t make for fully original resumes, but can certainly help in coming up with something at least somewhat different and eye-catching.
In the end, what I regret most is not reading my ARC sooner, because it would certainly have helped me more, and earlier!