My First Visual / Infographic Resume

One day, one of my friends contacted me for a job offer. His company is hiring and he wish to recommend me to the manager. Let’s not mention about the company’s name. Hmm… it is a multi-nation company with M character in front, that’s all. So I think it is a great chances to try something different and it is a big company, why not give it a try, right?

Well, since it is big and well-known company, I assume there will be a lot of submission other than mine. I need a special and attractive resume to impress the manager. Something like infographic to represent my resume will be great. Honestly, I’m not really good with design or photoshop, so I need something simple yet good enough to stand out from others. In the end, I choose to use timeline and map base design to create my own visual resume.

Below are the first 2 pages of my resume. It is a summary of the whole resume in visual format. The first page show my working experiences, education and my own projects in timeline. While the second page show my worldwide achievements in a world map. I also afraid that some one might want to know more detail about my work from the resume, so I included another 6 pages of “boring” text base writeup with detail info after the visual resume.

Ooi_Keng_Siang_Visual_Resume_01


(You can click to enlarge the image)

Ooi_Keng_Siang_Visual_Resume_02

Some might interested to know whatever I got the job offer or not. The answer is nope. I didn’t receive any follow up, e-mail or call after I submitted my resume. Even I though I’m 100% confident that with this resume I can get at least a interview call, but it just didn’t happen. I’m not sure what happen in there. Maybe they receive a lot more interest resumes compare with mine. Maybe.

Nope, I’m not disappointed with this. In fact, this give me more chances to try something else before I really go into the working life. Then why am I posting this blog post? I just want to share my own experience on how to create a different resume with simple design (although it might not be a successful happy ending case).

by Ooi Keng Siang via Ooiks’s Blog

7 thoughts on “My First Visual / Infographic Resume

  1. I understand what you are trying to achieve with your resume. I used to do a lot of interviewing in a previous life.
    An important thing to think about is, you want to get a interview as the first step. So you need to stand out in comparison to other people. Keep your resume to 2 pages as the maximum, nobody reads 6, 8 or 10 pages they just want a first impression to be able to say “We need to interview this Guy”. If you send too many pages you are likely not to get an interview.
    Keep everything in your resume as simple as you can, your timeline idea is super and that looks to be a good bait to dangle. Do not include a photograph of yourself as this gives interviewers the chance to have a thoughts about you before an interview.
    The process you are getting in to is a 2 step process.
    1/ Get an interview. Give bullet points on your resume and make sure you tell the M company what you can do for them in about 2 sentences.
    2/ Once you have the interview ask questions, but tell them what you can do for them and what an impact you can make on their business. This is when you need the documented proof of your achievements.
    Good luck you can definitely get the interview. Beware you don’t want to bore them….:)

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    1. Thanks for your advices. I agree with your points. 2 pages are enough to grab their attention. I guess I over did it.
      Hmm, no photograph, I will keep that in my mind.
      Thanks a lot for the tips and trick! 🙂

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  2. One other point I forgot to mention.
    If you send your resume in English, you should consider getting all your spelling, grammer and punctuation checked.
    Those type of errors will go against you.
    Good luck.

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