Is your resumé boring?

When I was a confused postgraduate researcher (if there's any other kind), I applied for a job in marketing and product development. The company asked for a pitch, rather than a straight curriculum vitae. I made something up in Adobe's Illustrator drawing tool, with some product development ideas (shower gel you could shave with, IIRC), and got an interview. After that, I made slightly weird CVs for a few other jobs, including ones at the British Antarctic Survey and EnCana (see image, right). Nowadays I tend to think that if I can't get a job with a weird CV, then it's not the sort of job I want.

Recently I have started just giving people my LinkedIn profile, which contains most of the information you'd usually put on a resumé. 

I have also looked at VisualCV, an online resumé tool, but never actually taken the time to try it. I'm not convinced it lets you be as creative as you might want to be. 

If you need more inspiration, check out this list of efforts. Most of them are for what are sometimes called 'creative' jobs like graphic design, but I would argue that geology and geophysics are creative jobs too!

I don't know how much I really need a resumé any more, but I've enjoyed maintaining this geological timetable since 2005; click to download the PDF. [Click here for 2016 version, now with fewer typos!]

Update

on 2010-12-21 11:35 by Matt Hall

LinkedIn just added a resumé builder to their Labs... Click here to try it out. It seems to work quite nicely, though the output is quite conservative, and I've run into a couple of bugs. Worth a look.