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7 Tips For Creating An Online Resume / CV

Having an online resume can be a great way to advertise your skills and availability for work to potential employers. However, many people simply move their “traditional” paper version online – this can be a problem as the typical layout and design of a paper CV is not necessarily well suited to the Web.

Earlier this week I released a new HTML template called Jamba (screenshot below) that can be used to create your own clean-looking resume and it got me thinking about what exactly you need to include in such designs. Below I share some tips that you’ll want to consider when putting your CV online.

Throughout this article I’ll switch between using the terms resume and CV, but I’m essentially referring to the same thing when doing so.

1. What Do You Need To Include?

There are several key things that potential employers will expect to see when looking at your online resume. These include your name and contact information, details of your work experience, your academic history, technical skills you possess, awards you have received, and certification for any training you have completed. Not all of these are critical, but most online CVs will contain at least a subset of these.

2. Keep It Concise

You need to make sure that your resume quickly informs a potential employer about who you are and what skills you have. People reading your CV are likely to be very busy and short of time, so make sure you keep it as short as possible and only include what’s absolutely essential. This can be difficult to achieve, but it’s crucial if you want your resume to read!

3. Make It More Personal

You want your CV to create a positive perception of you – a great way to achieve this is to include a nice photo of yourself. This will make your resume much more “personal” and will potentially help an employer to get a better sense of who you are. To take this a step further you could record a short video introducing yourself – this isn’t common practice, but it might help your CV stand out from the crowd.

4. Enhance Readability

Ensure that your CV is as easy to read as possible to enable employers to skim through the different sections quickly. Having dense paragraphs full of lots of text will result in your resume being ignored. Try and space things out and make it a pleasant reading experience – bullet points are also particularly useful for breaking your content up and making it easier to read.

5. Keep The Design Clean

When creating a design for your CV it’s important that you don’t overdo it. People often choose designs that look very nice, but don’t necessarily make it easy to read the content – this will only result in frustration for potential employers. The content of your resume is critical and takes priority over everything else – the design is also important, but it should help to emphasize and enhance the content – not make it more difficult to read.

6. Printing Your CV

You also need to give consideration to how well your CV will print. Your design might look great in a browser if it makes use of colored and textured backgrounds, but how well is that going to print? If there isn’t much contrast between the different colors used it might be very difficult to read when printed – it’s therefore worth considering the use of a white background and limited use of different colors.

7. Proof Read!

It’s absolutely critical that you proof-read your CV! There’s no excuse for having spelling and grammar mistakes and it will do nothing but create a bad impression if your content is littered with errors. Take the time to go through it in detail and ensure that it contains no mistakes. Also get others to read through it for you to make sure you haven’t missed any glaring errors.

Conclusion

Having an online resume is potentially very useful if you are looking for a new job – whether you design the CV yourself or if you purchase a template like Jamba, make sure that you put a lot of thought and consideration into the structure and content you include. Creating an effective and visually appealing CV is not easy – it can require quite a bit of time and effort, but it’s certainly time well spent if it helps you stand out from the crowd.