Creative résumé

Icons instead of labels, bars instead of sentences, two or three columns instead of one. Every one of those swaps a word a machine can search for something it cannot.

What this layout usually means

  • Two or three columns, often with a coloured block behind one of them
  • Icons in place of the words Email, Phone, Location
  • Skill "proficiency" bars, star ratings or percentage circles
  • Timelines drawn with lines and dots instead of dates in text

What happens when a machine reads it

Not an opinion about design. These are the things a text extractor does with a page, and you can watch ours do them to your own file at the bottom of this page.

Icons instead of words
An envelope glyph is a picture. The address beside it may survive; the fact that it is an email address does not, and a parser looking for a labelled field finds none.
Skill bars and ratings
A bar four-fifths filled says nothing in text. The skill name usually survives, the claimed level never does, and the space could have carried the tool names a filter is searching for.
Columns
The same interleaving as a sidebar, worse for being three columns rather than two. In the bad cases the document comes out as alternating fragments of unrelated sentences.
Graphic timelines
If the dates are drawn rather than written, the document has no employment dates at all — and years of experience is a filter on most searches.

Loses text

Keep it for a portfolio you hand over in person or attach as a second file. It is not the file to put through an application form.

Write one instead

Our builder writes the structure above, exports as PDF, Word or plain text, and shows you what a parser reads back as you type. Free, no account, and the download is not the paywall.

Open the free builder

Or check the one you have

Drop it here and see the text a screening system gets — which sections it finds, which it loses, and what it decides you do for a living. Read in this tab; nothing is uploaded.

Your file is read by code running in this tab. It is never sent anywhere, and we never see it. Open your browser’s network tab and drop it again — you will see no upload.