I was talking to a recruiter last month and showed him a 1 page CV I did. He told me that it was too colourful and I’ve heard that a couple times Right now I am sending 2 different ones, the one page CV called metro inspired by Windows 8 preview from awhile back and a cleaner version that goes into more depth. He told me to go into more depth with a 2 pager and the above is the result.
I didn’t want it to be a wall of text, that was never going to work out for me. So what I did I put icon images that I had as vector graphics in the CV. I felt I needed to do it give a voice and the icons help me do that. I used the blue because it gives a calm feeling for it. I decided to have some sort of imagery to break up all the text. I needed to punctuate it to have personality and make if feel like a person behind it rather than it being something just to scan.
(I have not spell checked this, so there will no doubt be errors but I just wanted to get how I felt about this CV down.)
This is a simple plan CV that has more focus. I wanted to use different but recognizable names for the words in blue. I broke down skills into general ones and computer related ones. The next page has a lot more space for education, volunteer work and other stuff. I put in books I am reading and more social media footprint to give it more grounding in stuff that I am reading now. I want to make whoever reads this feel like they can get a sense of who I am without spelling it out for them in broad day light which might be done right through style and wording.
I wanted to keep it light and the content mirror my one page CV here except it goes into much more detail. I guess what I feel about the suit version of my CV is that there was no spark of inspiration that led to its creation. It came out of advice and in spite of that advice I tried to add just enough style to still make it a bit different from a normal CV. When I showed it to my recruiter friend he liked the second one and I understood why. As a recruiter he wants the details so he can see if this person has the skills for whatever job is running the rounds
I made this in inDesign CS5 because it was more text heavy but still used illustrator for modifying the vector graphics before bringing them into inDesign. One of the features I like about inDesign is that it natively outputs to PDF with fewer steps that with illustrator which helped me see what it looked like when I made a change. I found it simple to use and hope to play around with inDesign CS5 more often when time allows.
I use both because these are now 2 different CV’s they are the same wearing different clothes. One is professional and the other is casual, light and fun. We all show different sides of who we are in different contexts but I hope using both shows whoever is taking a look that I have more than one side to see. We all do, they are each important to who we are and for any job or anything I want to be who I am. Someone who is searching, someone is not going to give up, and someone who will be more tomorrow than he is today am today and every day after. I have to do more than hope I gotta believe and sometimes that is the biggest challenge of them all.