Thread by @Alemja_art

I recently saw some artist’s resumes that looked nice yet they lacked so much information that they stop artists from being considered for a position. I want to share how to make a good resume that could apply to any artist + I made some visuals!
#PortfolioDay #artjobs 🧵

First and most important thing: resist the urge to over design your resume. Resumes get filtered by software & it must be clean and simple for the software to read it. If your resume can't be read by software you will get put in the reject pile before a human even looks at you.

This means just go down in a linear fashion. Create your resume in a word processor, not Photoshop. This way you can easily export as a .docx or .pdf and easily edit it later, which you will need to. It needs to be easy to read, easy to print, easy for software to read

Keep graphics out of your resume, with possible exception of a logo. A little bit of creativity there is fine, just make sure your name is in text form. The software can’t read images, you want as much in text as possible. Also don’t put your portrait, please.

No icons for software, no expertise bars, don’t list a version or year, especially for yearly releases. It can date you or make you seem out of touch if you use an icon or version that is too old. Recruiters may only know the name of a software, not what the icon looks like.

If a software is listed in the job you want and you’ve never touched it. Put it in anyway, apply, then download a free trial of the software and run through some tutorials. Even basic knowledge of a software is enough to say you know it.

Make sure your website and email are clickable in the digital form of your resume. Keep at minimum 2 versions of your resume, one with just your email on your website, one with email + phone number and other info for recruiters

Look at job listings of the positions you want, find the keywords and requirements they are looking for and focus on trying to get them in the experience portion of your resume. You can apply some of the soft skills to work outside of your industry

Writing about your experience is where a bunch of the keywords come in and make you seem like a good candidate, do not skimp out on writing about your experience. Only exception is writing about NDA stuff on a publicly facing resumes, please don’t do that.

Create a master document that holds all of the information you would possibly ever talk about, and trim down and tailor to a particular job from that.

If you have 5-ish years of professional experience its ok to start going over 1 page, and you can start trimming down less relevant experience as you get more experience in your industry.

Optimal Layout, these are ordered by importance
1. Name, website and contact info
2. Experience
3. Skills and software
4. Education and Awards

TL;DR
Make it boring & simple
Use job listings as reference for your experience bullet points
Make a master resume copy, then trim for jobs
Use a word processor, avoid images
Software reads your resume 90% of the time, resumes can get rejected if they don't pass filters