Should Your Resume Look Like an Instagram Post?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your money briefing. I'm J.R. Whelan at The Wall Street Journal in New York. Ah, these kids today. Generation Z, or people born after 1998, are revolutionizing the resume writing process, adding in photos, emoji, and animation to help tell their story. But not every employer thinks it's very cute. We'll explain in a moment. First, some money in market news you should know. Inflation rose at its strongest two-month pace since early 2006. The Labor Department says the consumer price index rose 0.3 percent last month as compared to June. That number excludes volatile sectors like food and energy.
How are Generation Z candidates changing resume design with photos, emoji and graphics?
But when looking at all the price increases, they were broad-based last month but mostly driven by energy and services such as health care, shelter, and transportation. And mortgage balances rose by $162 billion in the second quarter to about $9.4 trillion. That's a new record, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Mortgage originations, which include refinancings, increased by $130 billion to $474 billion in the second quarter. Mortgages, by the way, are the largest component of household debt, which has been on the rise since the middle of 2013. Overall household debt rose by 1.4% from the first quarter to $13.8 trillion. That's the 20th consecutive quarter of increases.
There isn't a lot of glitz and glamour in resume writing until now. Generation Z, or people born after 1998, are redoing the art of the resume. And Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter is here with some details. So, Chip, there are limits to how much personality a potential employer can glean from a candidate's writing, essentially black type on white paper. So many job applicants are trying to jazz up their resume.
That's right.
Why are some employers skeptical of Instagram-style resumes and personal photos?
And so we're seeing applicants do a range of things to try to add a little more personality to these. It ranges from adding a personalized bitmoji, those illustrated avatars to the top of the page, to people including their headshots, to icons of their favorite hobbies. Say you like do home renovations or swimming.
What specific creative elements are applicants adding to stand out on resumes?
People are adding those icons onto their resume. So just a range of different design flourishes to try to make these stand out for the pile.
And for the right kind of business, adding some flavor can help an employer get to know an applicant.
Companies say they want to get a sense for who someone really is, but I do think there's a limit to some of this. I mean, some employers say that these resumes have gone too far. One CEO joked to me that she looked at a resume that looked more like a Tinder profile than an actual resume. In this particular case, someone for an engineering position had included a range of photos of himself at the bottom of the resume. So it was a photo of him in a suit. It was a photo of him hiking. It was a photo of him in the street in New York. And she said she was really dumbfounded by this and just did not know why those photos had made it onto her resume.
Well, there are job and recruiting companies that in your article that say only add illustrations and personal statements if they're relevant to the job.
Well, that's it. I mean, you focus on what really matters here. You focus on the skills that will be relevant for the role. And so one of the companies I spoke with is Glassdoor, the job and recruiting site. They actually held a session for their interns a couple of weeks ago. And there, their recruiter said, stick to the basics, focus on what's relevant to the job, cut those things that are related to your love of cooking or that might have your kind of soft skills on them.
There are some limits, though, to how effective graphics, photos, and emoji can be on a resume. Lots of companies are using scanners these days to pick out keywords and phrases on a resume to weed out unqualified candidates. And anything other than text can really throw off that process.
That's really true. These systems are called applicant tracking systems. And they really are just trying to glean the best bits from the resumes, your name, your experience, your relevant skills.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:43
2
How are Generation Z candidates changing resume design with photos, emoji and graphics?
0:43–2:02
3
Why are some employers skeptical of Instagram-style resumes and personal photos?
2:02–2:20
4
What specific creative elements are applicants adding to stand out on resumes?
2:20–5:08
Speakers
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