Applying User Centered Design to a CV

From an Ex Recruiter turned UX Designer

Published in

UX Collective

5 min readJan 18, 2018

I’m currently going through the somewhat daunting process of applying for jobs. Having spent hours chopping and changing the layout of my CV, I started to think in more detail about the actual UX of a CV. I then had the bright idea of enlisting some help from recruiters to help me come up with the most user-friendly format. In this short post I’ll aim to answer the following questions from a user perspective:

What is it that makes for the best experience when reading a CV?
What are the possible pain points in a CV?
What is the most appropriate information architecture?

As an ex-recruiter, I know first hand the difficulties of trying to make sense of a poorly put together CV and working out whether it’s worth giving the candidate a shot. The CV acts as almost like a first gate to an opportunity, so you really want it to convey all that it needs to in the most intuitive way. You don’t want to fall down at the first hurdle…

Research

The first question to ponder is who the target audience is for a CV. The vast majority of the time, it will either be internal or external recruiters screening a CV for the first time — and the rest hiring managers. For the purpose of this article I did a brief survey which I shared across some recruitment forums. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to target hiring managers specifically, so all of the respondents are recruiters. But hey, that’s not such a bad thing! We can learn a lot from them.

Persona

I used the demographic information from the survey and what I know of the nature of a recruitment role to come up with a persona (apologies to any recruiters offended in the making of this persona). Meet Josh:

Research Findings

So now that we’ve become acquainted with Josh, our user, it’s time to find out the answers to the questions in the introduction. Using survey results (23 respondents) I’ll take you through the key findings for what makes for a good and bad CV, and the most appropriate taxonomy.

A Good CV

Key findings from the survey about what makes for a good CV are as follows:

Chronological work experience relevant to targeted job
Details of any successes and achievements
Clear and easy to follow
In depth skills section
White space
Bullet Points

A Bad CV

Unsurprisingly, recruiters had quite a lot to say about their CV pet peeves, the main ones being:

Over designed CV’s (too much colour, images, graphics)
Spelling mistakes
Lack of or uneasy to locate contact information
Education prior to work experience
Unclear dates (ie. months not specified)
Information that is no longer relevant (from a long time ago)
Too much fluffy stuff (description etc)
Hobbies (come on, surely we’re allowed to have interests)

Other slightly more unusual ones (I hope):

Different fonts
Photos
Cheesy quotes and cliches
Tables
Repetition of same bullet point in different roles

Information Architecture

I asked survey respondents to rank the following in terms of information heirarchy:

After analysing the 23 results, I came up with the following user informed information hierarchy:

The answer to the following question, however, shows that whilst recruiters would want to see the information hierarchy of above, the first section that they often look to is the last position the candidate had:

So, for a CV to be really user centred and to do ourselves justice we need to make sure we are clearly explaining what we did in our last position and tailoring it to the job we’re applying for.

The Design Process

Now that I’ve got an idea of what makes a user-friendly CV, I applied it on my own.

First Iteration

This is the first version of my CV — as you can see I tried to get a little creative with layout, icons and colours. Research suggested simpler CV’s are actually better, and over-designing is not a good move. However for people working in creative industries the research suggested a little more is expected in terms of design. From here, I wanted to create a simpler CV with an easier to follow information hierarchy. The contact details, in particular, were not easy enough to locate. I also had some pretty old information in there (see various roles).

Second Iteration

Here, I simplified the CV layout, got rid of the colourful and pretty huge name and replaced it with a header. I kept the iconography to keep things a little more ‘creative’ and designery (I know that’s not a word). The most important contact details are now in the header. I still felt that I could do better though. It felt imbalanced with so much white space on page 2.

Third Iteration

I added the header on Page 2 for consistency and to even things out a bit. From here, though, I realised I wasn’t following the ideal information hierarchy as informed by the user. So — I shimmied things around again.

Final Iteration

And here it is! The final CV follows the most user or recruiter friendly information hierarchy. It avoids any user pain points like photos, cheesy quotes, spelling mistakes, tables or different fonts and provides the most relevant information in an easy to find way.

Outcome

I have a CV that is hopefully user friendly and easy to follow…

If anyone wants a copy of the finished product, or simply wants to get in touch about any UX related enquiries, leave a comment below or email me!