More creative CVs have been made easily available through online design tools like Canva, and everybody has jumped on the bandwagon. CVs seem to have evolved to be just 1 page of profile pictures and accents in millennial pink, and I wish it would stop.

Now, let me be clear I am not saying that you shouldn’t want your CV to be visually interesting. In fact, I am often asking my clients what their favourite colour is, the types of fonts they like and how can we make the CV look like it belongs to them and is a part of their personal and professional brand. BUT this is after we have communicated their talents, projects, skills and experience.

Design-first will make the nuanced simple

These templates are not designed for paragraphs, they are designed to make your CV look like a clean bullet-pointed list.

As nice as Canva is, this does not serve you!

How can you feel comfortable putting years of experience and talent into a bullet-pointed list? LinkedIn is the only home for that level of simplification when it comes to you. A list is unlikely to tell me whether you are suitable for the role, the nuances of a project or your unique approach to it… all of that does not fit on one line.

You deserve for your CV to be more than just a slick design.

If you want a CV website… Get one

The appeal of these streamlined Resumes is that they make your experience look like a web page, complete with a profile photo of you in your finery with a loopty-loop header and all the social media icons alongside a line chart illustrating your competency in key skills or software.

But don’t be fooled, the home page of a CV website may look this way, but you will find a richness of detail behind each header and bullet point, with pages for a portfolio or links out to the specific project/campaigns you worked on that are publicly available.

p.s. often if you download a pdf. from these websites it knocks out the words as text and essentially saves it as a photo making it impossible for a human to click the hyperlinks or a machine to scan for important keywords. Always double-check by opening your CV and clicking your links and searching a word.

Is it comfy inside that box? 

With a snazzy firmly-formatted template you won’t stop to ask if you need all the sections in the template OR indeed if something is missing. Something as simple as needing to segment your experience as relevant and further so it illustrates the career pivot you took will not come naturally with a template you are scared to mess up. In this way, you are missing an opportunity to fully express yourself.

And don’t get me started on those 1-paged templates. 1 page will only suffice if you are a student with no work experience or voluntary experience or projects or anything. If you have been working for more than a year and have a few qualifications, skills and interests… 1 page will not be enough.

The Solution

Make a great looking CV, but make sure it presents a great looking YOU. Use these amazing design tools AFTER you have the words locked in because millennial pink… won’t get you the call.