Getting a job is tough. Standing out among a crowded pool of qualified applicants is becoming harder and harder. What’s a recent grad to do? If you’re Chris Spurlock from the University of Missouri, you’re in luck. Rather than conform to the norm, Chris transformed his resume into an infographic. As you can see from the design below, it’s clean and quite entertaining. This might be the most engaging resume I’ve ever seen. Click the image to enlarge.
A New Job
What has this nifty infographic led to for Chris? A new job at the Huffington Post! Chris will be designing infographics that you’ll likely see in the very near future. The original post, which garnered thousands of Facebook “Likes,” hundreds of tweets, and tens of thousands of pageviews, eventually convinced HuffPost to bring on Spurlock as a Huffington Post Infographic Design Editor, but not before Kanalley wrote a followup post “How to Make Your Resume Stand Out: 5 Tips From Chris Spurlock.”
A Course About Designing Infographics?
In fact, Chris enjoys infographics so much that he actually wants to create a course (and teach it) about making infographics (he calls it ‘visual displays of factual information’).
Says Spurlock, “I always keep a Twitter search handy for the word ‘infographic,’ and every day there’s something that’s huge. That’s been retweeted a thousand times.” Imagine his amazement when his own creation eventually met with the same fate.
“It’s something new and developing,” says Spurlock on his unique niche, “So there’s not really a place for it yet.“ When asked what his advice would be for J-School students trying to replicate his mainstream media success, “Do something different. You just got to get noticed, and it’s hard when the number of Journalism grads is increasing and the number of jobs is decreasing. But if you want someone to pay attention to you you have to make them.”
About the Author
I would take the class. That would be great to use for students creating reports!
[...] An article on the multimedia journalism website 10,000 Words.com also extolls the virtues of visually-driven resumes, and cites the case of college student Christopher Spurlock, whose well crafted resume recently landed him a job with the Huffington Post. [...]
Spurlock’s infographic resume has been the inspiration for infographic artists everywhere! @nuzumes is creating infographic resumes as a service, not as a web page. Might be handy for people who want something to take in when they interview as opposed to trying to get employers to look online at it.