How to best present your credentials (via a resume, online profile, or via your personal website) is a hot topic in the career world. Recently, several sites have come on the scene to help job seekers create infographic resumes. These completely visual (graph based) documents usually draw on information you either input into a form or they rely on existing information about you, for example your LinkedIn or Facebook profile. The resulting resume, conventional wisdom suggests, will help the job seeker stand out from a crowd of “boring,” conventional resumes.

I’ve written about this subject and taken the position that, while fun and visually stimulating, an infographic resume cannot be read via the Applicant Tracking Systems most companies are using, so would be completely useless to use to apply for most jobs. For networking purposes, it can certainly be eye-catching to have a graph-based version of your resume to share, and you may be able to get some millage from sharing a PDF of an infographic resume on your social resume, or personal website.

My opinion is, anything you can do by entering information into a form or connecting an application to your LinkedIn profile and pressing a button does not really illustrate any specific skills you have! For now, you may get some attention with an infographic resume as an accompanying document if a human being reviews it — for example, when mailed — which is very rare.

As I explain in my Job-Hunt.org article on the subject, as with anything related to your job search, consider your target audience and their needs. Unless your resume infographic will be unique and appeal to the employer, think twice before assuming your “outside of the box” approach (and how unique is it really once all of the career bloggers are blogging about it?) is going to be the thing that lands you a job.

These are the tools I mention and evaluate in my post on Job-Hunt.org:

• Vizualize.me
• Kinzaa
• Re.vu
• Brazen Careerist
• Slideshare 

Read the full post on Job-Hunt.org here.

sample infographic resume from Devign Elements

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