By Sean Weinberg
Let's visualize, shall we? Close your eyes (on second thought, don't close your eyes), clear your mind, and imagine a resume.
What do you see?
Do you see a piece of paper? Nice paper? Bullet points? Times New Roman
font? You might be something slightly different, but probably only slightly.
While 99.9% of the world sees a resume as a document, that last .01%
saw it completely differently. Check out these four offbeat resume
ideas:
1. The "Hire Me" Webpage Resume
When trying to get hired by a dot-com superstar, why not get a .com yourself? Since Jamie Varon started Twitter Should Hire Me, many job seekers followed suit with creative blogs. My favorite has to be Squicky for combining a MIT PhD with Microsoft Paint.
2. The Artsy Resume
Like to draw? Ditch writing your resume and start doodling! Great examples of illustrated resumes include Jonathan Wong's Curriculum Vitae, Pau Morgan's Pie Chart Timeline and Ben Fogarty's LifeChart. If you're looking for a job in design, why not combine your resume and portfolio?
3. The Quirky YouTube Resume
The job search is a lot like dating, so why not outwardly woo a potential employer? Matthew Epstein has been trying to land an interview with Google HR, so he came up with a simple idea: woo Google through YouTube. If you're going to have a video resume, make it memorable.
4. The Business Card Resume
Probably the least outlandish resume of the bunch (yet probably the most effective) is the resume business card.
When networking, you hand out so many business cards, so why not cut
out the LinkedIn-stalking process by including your entire resume in a
cleverly origami-ed fashion?
DISCLAIMER: These ideas are supremely neat and
definitely one in a million, but remember this: if everyone starts using
a quirky, out-of-the-box resume to apply, HR folks are going to be
overwhelmed and desensitized – and that quirky, out-of-the-box resume
might not seem so unique anymore.