
Resume vs CV: What’s The Difference & Does it Matter?
Resume vs CV. The ultimate job-hunting battle royale. Are these two contenders evenly matched? Who'll claim victory in this epic bout? You’re about to find out!
Eye-popping infographic CV templates look great but looks aren’t everything. We’ll show you how to get creative without ruining your job prospects.
Be eye-catching. Be attention-grabbing. Stand out from the crowd.
If you’ve spent any time at all reading about how to apply for a job you’ll have seen this advice and wondered what you can do to give your CV the wow factor.
You might even have been tempted to use an infographic CV. It’s understandable, a well-designed infographic CV template is colourful, distinctive and jumps off the screen. But they’re a risky proposition too and can seriously harm your chances of job-hunting success.
So we’re going to show you some colourful examples of CV infographic design. But we’ll also explain what an infographic CV is and the problems you can encounter when using them. Then we’ll show you some alternative CV templates that are guaranteed to work.
Want to save time and have your CV ready in 5 minutes? Try our CV builder. It’s fast and easy to use. Plus, you’ll get ready-made content to add with one click. See 20+ CV templates and create your CV here.
Sample CV made with our builder—See more CV examples here.
And when you’re finished, make sure you take a look at our other CV template collections too.
Lucy McDonald
Ph: 0777 777 7777
Email: lucymcd_zety@gmail.com
Experienced assistant manager in wine and spirits retail. Key areas of expertise in premium Bordeaux and Burgundy wines. Expert in offering educational and promotional tasting experiences to customers. Looking to further my knowledge of luxury wine sales with Leveson’s Wine Merchant.
Work Experience
Assistant Manager
Zenith Wines, Battersea, London
August 2017–Present
Education
Arts and Sciences BASc, September 2014–June 2017
University College London
Skills
Awards
You can download this template from Canva’s infographic CV maker.
This infographic CV template free download is also available from Canva.
This infographic CV template is available at Behance. Here’s the link.
Here’s the link to this infographic CV.
Here’s the link to this infographic CV.
Here’s the link for this infographic CV template.
Here’s the link to download this infographic CV design.
Here’s the link for this infographic template for free download.
When making a CV in our builder, drag & drop bullet points, skills, and auto-fill the boring stuff. Spell check? Check. Start building a professional CV template here for free.
When you’re done, Zety’s CV builder will score your CV and tell you exactly how to make it better.
So let’s start off with: what is a CV? Quick definition, it’s a formal document that you use to apply for jobs. It’s a summary of your work history, education and skills. It used to just be a plain text document, but with the advent of more sophisticated word processing and editing tools it can become something more complex.
An infographic CV allows you to present your qualifications in a more visually compelling way. A traditional CV uses plain text to arrange your information. But an infographic CV template uses graphic design elements such as colour, icons, images and font styling to present your content.
The examples you’ve just seen show this perfectly, they’re all eye-catching and creative that’s for sure.
And because of that, they can be a good choice for visually creative careers, such as for a graphic design CV. But even then they can be problematic and for the vast majority of candidates they aren’t the best choice. Let’s see why.
But don’t let this put you off completely. You can include some graphical elements on a CV without these risks. You just need CV templates that are expertly designed to create the perfect balance between creativity and readability. And you’re about to see some that do just that.
As you’ve just seen, an infographic CV is usually more of a headache than it’s worth. But you don’t have to go to the other extreme and go back to a plain text CV. These templates are all beautifully presented with carefully chosen graphical elements that are attractive and functional. Let’s take a look.
Our Cascade template gives you creativity without complexity. There’s colour shading in the left-hand column and the white font over a dark background provides a good contrast to the main body of the CV. The two-column format creates a compact structure too, perfect for shrinking a lengthy plain text version into a one page CV. And we do allow for creativity too, you’re not just limited to blue. Our CV builder lets you choose from 400 colours.
Read more: How to Write a Professional CV
As you can see, Diamond makes use of diamond-shaped icons and bullet points. Icons are a particularly effective infographic element as they simplify the communication of complex ideas. But they do it in a subtle and space-saving way. You’re not filling up valuable space with large graphics, neither are you confusing the ATS when you submit your application. It strikes that perfect balance between creativity and readability we mentioned earlier.
To test if a CV template is ATS compatible save it as a plain text file and check the result. If it’s missing content, has scrambled text or looks disorganised then chances are it’s not ATS compliant.
Read more: 20+ Job-Winning CV Tips & Advice
This one does what it says on the tin and features your initials as an eye-catching graphical element. And the beauty of it is that it’s fully automated, you just type in your name into our CV builder then it does everything for you. And that’s another problem with infographic CV templates. You’ll usually need image editing skills to create one. But our builder lets anyone achieve professional results, just enter your content and you’re set.
Read more: References on a CV: Should You Include Them?
This example is proof that simple graphical elements can create powerful results. You don’t need eyeball-searing colour and complex graphs. Here the two bars of colour to the top left and bottom right help to pull the reader’s gaze all the way across the page from top to bottom. People tend to read content on a screen using F-shaped scanning, meaning they’ll mainly focus on the top left of the page. This combats that tendency and makes sure more of your content gets read.
Read more: Please Find Attached My CV: The Best Way to Say It
Primo is full of useful infographic CV elements. It has that attractive stamp for your initials, CV icons and a line connecting all the section headings and bullet points. Another method of getting the reader to go all the way down the page. And like many of our CVs it uses health bars to depict the candidate’s level of skill in software and languages. That’s an infographic element borrowed from gaming and it’s a fantastic visual representation of skill levels.
Read more: Best CV Structure: How to Set Out a Perfect CV
And don’t forget, we’ve got a total of 18 CV templates, all of which make effective and safe use of infographic elements to give attractive results without harming your job prospects.
Plus, a great cover letter that matches your CV will give you an advantage over other candidates. You can write it in our cover letter builder here. Here's what it may look like:
See more cover letter templates and start writing.
Infographic CV templates need to be used with caution. There’s no point in choosing a visually attractive template if it ruins your chances of success. Use expert-designed templates that you can create in an easy-to-use builder instead.
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions about CV infographic design then please use the comments section below and I’ll be happy to help.
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