Humanize your Résumé Data, to Narrate Your Story
Social networks have made establishing professional connections and finding jobs more accessible. This has increased the significance of establishing an individual’s online presence.
With data visualizations being actively used to communicate and present insights, visual resumes have become a norm to present oneself online. So if you are looking for jobs or want to create a online presence for more visibility, visual resumes are your go to.
Adapting storytelling in your visual resume, will allow you to connect, leave an impact and let the employer relate to your profile.
This blog post discusses ways to humanize your resume data, and enable the visual resumes tell your story. Because, at the end of the day, it is the emotional connection obtained through your story, is what lets the employers relate to you.
Storytelling
The important aspects of storytelling are: to have a start point, provide context with the plot and conclude with an ending. In the case of visual resumes, storytelling can be adapted as the following:
- Your starting state (a challenge)
- Your role and responsibility (the plot)
- Lessons learnt and skills developed (the ending)
Resumes & Interviews
Resumes are highly correlated with interviews, as they are used in the same context of job recruitment. When we think about interviews, the first question that is commonly asked as the ice breaker by many interviewers is “Tell me about yourself”.
At some point, we all have mentally prepared for an answer to the “tell me about yourself”. In your visual resumes, this acts as the visualization question, a.k.a., the objective of your visual resume. Upon interacting your visual resume, you need to enable the observer learn your answer to the “tell me about yourself” through the obtained patterns and insights.
Generally, the answer to “tell me about yourself” follows a structure where one addresses the following demographic details such as: name, age, educational background and work experience, if any. Some also include their strengths, weaknesses, hobbies and causes they care about.
Adapting the storytelling framework to your answer, will deal with categorizing the answer to have a start point (a purpose or challenge), the plot (your journey) and the ending (skills obtained, while mentioning challenges faced and lessons learnt). Categorizing the “tell me about yourself” answer in this manner, will allow you to find your way while creating your visual resume.
Humanizing your Resume Data
Resume is a consolidated source of demographic data about a person, which is used for profiling oneself. Education and work experience are significant sections in a resume, as they give an overview of a candidate’s qualification to the employers.
Education section in a resume conveys educational background details such as enrolled year, major, minor, grades and school. This section can be humanized by concentrating on narrating subject interests, projects worked-on, and activities participated in. Remember to capture moments and achievements, which were challenging and fun.
Work experience section in a resume, highlights on previous job role, job tenure and experience. Usually, people also mention the responsibilities handled and company or organization’s details. Humanizing this section will deal with focus on your responsibilities, personal growth and achievements. Ensure to highlight the projects you worked on and the skills developed.
Projects and skills are two attributes which are to be highlighted in both education and work experience. The best way to humanize these would be by adapting the storytelling framework: starting with challenges faced (start point), elaborating on the journey (plot) and end with the skills developed as the outcome (ending).
In addition to your personal demographic details like languages known and contact information, humanizing remaining sections of your resume involves including additional details which provide humanized context.
Hobbies and causes you care about , encode your values and characteristics as a person. In your visual resume, relating this data to the projects you worked on will allow room for more insights.
After your visual resume is ready, be sure to ask your friends to read it in front of you. Observe the following while they interact: What are the insights they obtained from your resume? Also, do they find the narrative relatable to your story?
Extras: One can define their own metrics such as confidence, as a level of success to quantify and make outcomes measurable. Quantification of the metric can be done using 5 or 10 point rating scales. This will let the employers observe a person’s growth and journey.
In my next blog post, I will be elaborating on how to create a visual resume with humanized narrative storytelling, using visualization tools such as — DataStudio. Stay Tuned :)
