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IT recruiters often work with various kinds of designers and creative professionals to find IT jobs.  Often, technical recruiters come across resumes for these IT professionals that are done with pictures, unconventional formats, and multiple types of font.  If you’d like to attract IT staffing firms and hiring managers, doing this with your resume may actually be hurting you.

Why would it turn off IT recruiting agencies and potential employers to showcase your design skills and creativity on your resume?  For one thing, it may make it harder for IT staffing agencies to find the information they need to decide you’re a great candidate for particular roles.  Since IT recruiting firms often sift through hundreds of resumes daily, their time is limited.  They may not have time to decipher a format that is anything beyond simple and conventional.  The same is true for potential employers—except even more so.  Hiring managers are interviewing, and usually doing so on top of a large workload.  Their time to read through resumes will be even more limited.  Make it easy and fast for IT staffing companies and employers to decide you’re an interesting candidate by using a conventional, clean resume format.

The second reason a creative resume format may hinder your job search is that it may suggest that your skills and experience aren’t strong enough to speak for themselves.  Gimmicky resumes are often used by professionals who aren’t as confident in their own candidacy.  Use a conventional format and showcase your experience, technical proficiencies, and other skills.  You can always showcase design skills in a portfolio or links to relevant work.  If you use a more conventional resume format, you will get more attention from IT recruiting agencies and hiring managers.