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.
Contact Information
Include this content in the contact-information section at the top of the resume:
- Name: Names are a well-known source of bias on resumes. Be consious about ethncity, if you’re concerned that your identity may negatively impact your application, substitute your last name with your first initial. It’s also okay to use a preferred name but remember to use your legal name on job-application forms.
- Location: Mention where you currently live using your city, state, and ZIP code. Your complete mailing address is unnecessary and just another source of unconscious bias. Your location is relevant to hiring managers for various reasons: time-zone collaboration, salary expectations based on living expenses, office proximity for hybrid or on-site roles, or legal requirements.
- Portfolio link: Link directly to your portfolio website or file-download service. Write out the URL and use a link-shortener service if necessary. Be careful if your name is included in the URL when using the first-initial tactic mentioned above. Remember to use a signifier to denote clickability.
- Email address: Use one professional email address. Be cautious with long-standing email providers like Yahoo or AOL that may contribute to ageism. Avoid email addresses based on online pseudonyms that may be interpreted as juvenile. Again, be aware if your full name is in your email address.
- Phone number: Include one personal phone number where the hiring manager can reliably contact you. Make sure it has a brief, clear voicemail recording identifying you as the recipient. Don’t forget to use dashes and parentheses to chunk the content for easier recall.
- Small visual elements: If visual design is one of your skills, the contact information section is where visual accents, like personal branding, could be included. Keep them small and unobtrusive if you even decide to have them.
Work Experience
Underneath the contact information, list your experience. Include this information for each experience:
- Job title: List your job title in bold.
- Employer: List the employer in bold and don’t include logos. Don’t use hyperlinks as that may distract the hiring manager with tertiary details. Don’t list a client business as your employer if you weren’t a full-time employee of that business.
- Dates: Include start and end dates using both months and years. Use present for the end date if this is your current job.
- Location: Not always essential to include but add it if it clarifies the job or use a remote label.
- Responsibilities: Summarize your job duties in 2–3 concise sentences. Checking your job description can help. Lead with verbs (Conduct user research) instead of pronouns (I am responsible for user research). Use numbers when appropriate to communicate the context and scope of your duties. Describe the type of clients you helped, if applicable and acceptable.
- Achievements: Achievements are what make your resume shine. Achievements are impactful results you delivered during your tenure by applying your skills, abilities, and talents.
- Format achievements in a bulleted list using a circle. ATS scans sometimes rely on detecting circles to identify achievements. Stick to standards and invest energy in your content.
- Emphasize quantitative results and numbers.
- Order achievements by impact. Start with those you hope to discuss with the hiring manager in an interview.
- Keep achievements to one line each.
- Aim for at least one achievement per job and list more for more-recent experiences and fewer for less-recent ones.
- Write a quantitative achievement using this structure: [Verb] [quantitative outcome] [context] using [skill/tool/technology]. Some examples:
- Increased conversion rate by 10% for ecommerce shop using sketching, high-fidelity prototyping in Figma, and A/B testing.
- Increased the rate of new-customer acquisition by 20% for social-networking mobile app using user interviews and customer-journey mapping.
- Increased visitor-donation rate by 15% for animal-shelter site using a content audit and A/B testing.
- Nonquantitative achievements are less persuasive, but can still convey your effectiveness. Follow the same structure as for quantitative achievements. Some examples:
- Recognized with “Circle of Excellence” award by peers (1% of 1,000 employees) for teamwork with launching new brand.
- Implemented new training program 1 month ahead of schedule and in budget with Smartsheet.
- Earned Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.
- Secured promotions for 3 high-performing direct reports using career-development plans.