As a freelancer or job seeker, it is important to have a resume that
stands out among the rest — one of the more visually pleasing options on
the market today is the infographic resume.
An infographic resume enables a job seeker to better visualize his or her career history, education and skills.
Unfortunately, not everyone is a graphic designer, and whipping up a
professional-looking infographic resume can be a difficult task for the
technically unskilled job seeker. For those of us not talented in
design, it can also be costly to hire an experienced designer to toil
over a career-centric infographic.
Luckily, a number of companies are picking up on this growing trend
and building apps to enable the average job seeker to create a beautiful
resume.
To spruce up your resume,
check out these four tools for creating an infographic CV. If you’ve
seen other tools on the market, let us know about them in the comments
below.
Vizualize.me is a new app that turns a user’s LinkedIn profile information into a beautiful, web-based infographic.
After creating an account and connecting via LinkedIn,
a user can edit his or her profile summary, work experience, education,
links, skills, interests, languages, stats, recommendations and awards.
And voila, a stunning infographic is created.
The company’s vision is to “be the future of resumes.” Lofty goal,
but completely viable, given that its iteration of the resume is much
more compelling than the simple, black-and-white paper version that
currently rules the world.
Re.vu, a newer name on the market, is another app that enables a user
to pull in and edit his or her LinkedIn data to produce a stylish
web-based infographic.
The infographic layout focuses on the user’s name, title, biography,
social links and career timeline — it also enables a user to add more
graphics, including stats, skill evolution, proficiencies, quotes and
interests over time.
Besides the career timeline that is fully generated via the LinkedIn
connection, the other graphics can be a bit tedious to create, as all of
the details must be entered manually.
Based on a user’s imported LinkedIn data, Kinzaa creates a
data-driven infographic resume that focuses on a user’s skills and job
responsibilities throughout his or her work history.
The tool is still in beta, so it can be a bit wonky at times — but if
you’re looking for a tool that helps outline exactly how you’ve divided
your time in previous positions, this may be your tool of choice.
Unlike other tools, it also features a section outlining the user’s
personality and work environment preferences. Details such as
preferences on company size, job security, challenge level, culture,
decision-making speed and more are outlined in the personality section,
while the work environment section focuses on the user’s work-day
length, team size, noise level, dress code and travel preferences.
Brazen Careerist,
the career management resource for young professionals, launched a new
Facebook application in September that generates an infographic resume
from a user’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn information.
After a user authorizes the app to access his or her Facebook and
LinkedIn data, the app creates an infographic resume with a unique URL —
for example, my infographic resume is located at brazen.me/u/ericaswallow.
The infographic features a user’s honors, years of experience,
recommendations, network reach, degree information, specialty keywords,
career timeline, social links and LinkedIn profile image.
The app also creates a “Career Portfolio” section which features
badges awarded based on a user’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
achievements. Upon signing up for the app, I earned eight badges,
including “social media ninja,” “team player” and “CEO in training.”
While badges are a nice addition, they aren’t compelling enough to keep
me coming back to the app.
Your Thoughts
Have you used a web app to create an infographic resume? If so, which
tool did you use and how was your experience? Let us know in the
comments below.
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