Avoid Content in Your Resume

Resumes are primarily for UX hiring managers — those responsible for advancing your application for a UX job opportunity. It’s essential to understand and empathize with the hiring-manager persona. Resumes are scanned for about 6-7 seconds in the familiar F-shaped pattern discovered from our past eye tracking research.

Three unhelpful ways to convey skills on resumes. The first lists 5 skills like high-fidelity prototyping and bars denoting their proficiency with that skill. The second is similar but uses filled in 5 empty or filled dots instead of bars. The third is just a list of skills and technologies like sketching or HTML.
Self-assessment of skills (whether in the shape of a rating, chart, or even a simple list) is highly subjective and lacks information about where and how you used the corresponding skills.

Your resume will be more persuasive by avoiding these types of content:

  • Lists of skills or technologies: Creating lists of skills or technologies is a popular approach to cram more keywords into a resume to trick the ATS algorithms. These lists are ultimately filler to a human, though. When or where did you use paper prototyping? What did you accomplish by using it? These lists are a form of keyword stuffing that harms your resume’s understandability to humans.
  • Unit or bar charts: These data visualizations attempt to convey one’s skill in an area by displaying a numerical rating, such as 4 dots out of 5 for Figma. They look stylish, but the ratings are arbitrary (you made them up!) and are just as devoid of context as skill lists. Worse, they’re more space inefficient.
  • Headshots: Your appearance is an obvious source of unconscious bias. Never include.
  • Mission or objective statements: Smart hiring managers skip this content and make their own determinations. They already know you’re interested in the UX job because you applied. Persuade them by communicating educational and professional progress on your UX-career change, not with prose.
  • Subheadings: Make no mistake: subheadings help structure web pages and reduce undesirable F-pattern scanning. However, UX-career changers benefit from sequencing their activities chronologically, so that UX education is placed prominently on the resume and not buried in an Education section.
  • References: It’s great to have professional references, but it’s unnecessary to list them or waste valuable resume space declaring that references are available upon request.
  • Hobbies and volunteering: What you do with your free time is your own business and irrelevant to future employers. It may also signal aspects of your identity that could increase unconscious bias.
  • Professional organizations: Participation or volunteer-leadership roles in professional UX organizations (like HFES or UXPA) are appropriate inclusions only for students or recent graduates with minimal career history.
  • School or personal projects: Your portfolio is the best medium to document projects. Relisting projects on your resume is a filler tactic. Personal projects involving unsolicited redesigns are unrealistic and unpersuasive due to a lack of constraints, compromises, or deadlines.