Resume Templates: What Brand Is Your Resume?

If you invested all your money in launching a new product to the marketplace would you order plain white boxes and print your product name in black across the front and ship them off to the stores and hope for the best? If you did chances are you would lose all your money. Yet that is exactly what most job hunters do. They invest everything in getting a new job and take all their skills, knowledge, and qualifications and package them in plain black and white resumes and cover letters.

Did you know many manufacturers spend more on packaging products than the worth of the products themselves? This is because they know packaging sells products. When a manufacturer ships their products off to be displayed on store shelves they know that the packaging must do most or all of the selling from that point on. Just like when you send your resume and cover letter off to a potential employer, your documents must do all the work selling you.

Packaging your qualifications with creative resume templates is smart marketing. While many templates can make creating your resume easier, run of the mill resume templates are probably not doing much for your marketing campaign. Plain black and white templates say here is another generic common candidate. The idea is to stand out and get positive attention. You can take advantage of the same marketing tactics businesses have known about for a century.

One such marketing tactic is the use of color. Color is a powerful weapon in the packaging wars. Marketing studies have proven color packaging sells products. Marketing is a science and businesses know consumers react to color and when employers receive color graphic resumes they do sit up and take notice.

Getting noticed is half the battle but not enough. Resume templates must balance practicality with creativity. Branding is about adding value not obscuring your message. Your information should be well placed where employers expect to find each section. The text must be readable and the templates need to allow you to edit font styles and sizes. Your name and contact information fields ought to be at the top of the page. There should be no way a reader could mistake who you are and how to reach you.

Use live links on your resume templates for your professional social media branding. This includes a professional website, or profiles on linkedin, plaxo, xing, ecademy, internations, or other industry specific social networks. You should also include a link back to your resume online, accessible as a PDF file. You can exclude personal information such as your street address and use only a job hunting dedicated email address for contact on public postings.

Attractive, professional, color resume templates that have well designed layouts for your information can cause employers to read your resume. At that point your writing does the work. Even the most creative packaging can miss the mark if the message is not selling. In this case the message is the information on your resumes and cover letters. Your writing and sentence structure is not where you should be test marketing.

While your packaging might be creative, employers still expect to see traditional resume sentences without the use of pronouns. Your statements should be to the point sentences that can be read at a glance. Use shorter sentences that do not wrap when possible.

Even when utilizing resume templates do not try to cram all the information in that you can. This can make your writing confusing and difficult to read. Use a template that allows you to set line spacing and keep that to 1.5 or double to make text easier to read. If your document looks crowded, or you have reduced your font to microscopic pixels in an attempt to get everything on the page, create a multiple page resume. In that case use page numbers and include your contact information clearly at the top of each page.

Unless everyone who receives your resume already knows who you are; you are not a developed brand. You need to develop resume personality specifically for your career brand. You need resume charisma! Attractive resume templates can get you attention and help establish who you are in the mind of a potential employer. There are creative resume templates specifically designed to do exactly that for you.
Copyright 2011 by Phil Baker - "The Hire Authority" and author of the bestseller: Employer Secrets. Freely distribute this article but please leave article, author name, copyright info, and links intact.