25 Hot Dang Inspirational Resumes

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 Resumes once followed a no-frills format: Name, contact info and a chronological listing of experience. Fini!

The competition for jobs these days, however, is fierce, ugly and brutal. Employers report receiving up to 250 applications for entry-level positions, and old-fashioned resumes lead more often to yawns than interviews. Spurred by the tough competition, some job hunters have reached new creative heights in an effort to stand out from the crowd. 

Such creativity will do more than draw attention. Entertaining resumes are often passed on to co-workers, friends and sometimes the Internet, increasing your exposure and chances of securing a coveted position.

To stir your creative juices, we've compiled a list of 25 resumes that scream, "I'm creative! Hire me!" While most require mad design skills, we hope they'll help reinvigorate your job hunt. For those not looking for work, we hope they'll serve as entertainment. (Many of these resumes defy description so click through to get the full effect.)

1. Hair-raising Animation
Alexis Trépanier, an interactive artist from Quebec, created an animated resume that has received international attention. As Trépanier discusses his accomplishments, which appear in a halo around his head, his hair and beard grow shorter and shorter. At the end, Trépanier sneezes and the hair bursts back into the original giant Afro.

2. Flashy!
Alexandre Gueniot English skills may be less than perfect but the humor and crazy skills this Frenchman showcases in his Flash resume landed a job with Microsoft. Well worth the effort, wouldn't you say?

3. Comic Genius
F. J. Garcia wanted to be a professional comic artist because it would allow him to be "King and lord of (almost) everything!" This led the Spanish artist to create a  comic-strip resume. Joshua Drummond created a comic-book resume that is more polished and makes you want to read through to the end.

4. Gaming the System
What do you do when you're resume is rather slim? Turn it into a game, of course. Kristian Leigh Walsh developed a video and interactive resume in the form of a LIFE board game, with a little car tracing her life's path. Unfortunately, Walsh doesn't mention a specific career goal so it's difficult to understand the type of job she is seeking.

5. Fill-in-the-Blank
Sean McNally wanted a job in the games industry, so he created a resume using a gaming "Character Resume" as the base. In addition to detailing his experience, McNally sprinkled plenty of humor throughout.

6. Homo Sapien Applicant
Some people have creativity to burn. Argentinian artist Federico Moral stuffed his one-sheet resume with Da Vinci illustrations, mirror writings and personal information. Unfortunately, the eye doesn't know where to look first. My favorite is his illustration tracking of the human species, from Homo habilis to Hombre de Nuñes.

7. Waiting on a Job
Even waiters need to stand out these days with spiffy resumes. Matthew Villalovos hired a skilled designer to create a resume based on a waiter's order pad with a restaurant background. It's clever without looking like Villalovos spent a fortune.

8. Origami Resume
Creativity can go a long way towards boosting a thin portfolio. Designer Samuel J. Mallett created a Flashy folded-paper resume while still in his third year at the University of Wales Newport.

9. The Shirt Off Her Back
Employment specialists say we should wear our accomplishments proudly. A Spanish company took that concept to the next level with T-shirt resumes. One sample reads, "You should offer me a job. Look at how creative I am." The back, of course, is a reprint of the job hunters standard resume.

10. Doodlicious
Why waste hours doodling stars in boring classes when you can doodle a resume? Graphic designer Krista Gregg took a simple piece of ruled school paper and doodled herself up a job. Best of all, Gregg avoided hours jiggering graphics on a computer. (Unfortunately, Gregg's headline drops the "p" in graphic designer -- a rather glaring error.)

11. Passport to Employment
It's hard to tell if Jonathan Fischer has much career experience but his passport-replica ?????? (resume) is a real door opener. From the burlap cover to the passport photo showing Fischer in a Russian military uniform, the entire piece is irresistible.

12. Transit-ory
Jonathan Kaczynski must have spent a lot of time on mass transit systems. His resume looks like a standard, multi-colored transit map. A closer look, however, reveals the designer replaced the names of stops with points along his career path. It's simple, easy to read and gets Kaczynski's message across in a clever way.

13. Timeline Updated
Michael Anderson took a new approach to the typical time-line theme. The designer/illustrator/photographer created brightly colored infographics detailing his employment timeline with a mountain range; a 3-D ring of his primary skill sets; and a humorous circle graph of his daily intake/output of coffee, humor, communication, productivity and focus.

14. Friend Me
It was only a matter of time before someone created a Facebook replica resume. Photographer Sabrina Saccoccio did such a good job her resume went viral. Saccoccio's homepage is chock full of important details in an amusing format. She even included a sidebar ad for Air New Zealand. Naturally, Saccoccio listed 999,999 friends.

15. Headshot
Actors usually print their resumes on the back of a prettified headshot. Francis Homo took the concept one step further with a humorous twist and printed his resume splayed over a silhouette headshot. This may be one format applicants armed with basic desktop skills could recreate.

16. The Write Guy
Ellen Ternes created a magazine-cover resume in an effort to land a magazine writing job. While she didn't get the job, the concept and follow through is pure genius. Ternes' one sheeter replicates a cover of "The Writer" magazine with blurbs like, "The 'Write Guy' for the Job" and "Your Next Editor? ...He's just a phone call away!" Ternes includes her contact information in the address label, complete with bar code.

17. Movie Poster
The world is ready for a  horror flick exposing the ugly underbelly of job hunting. To market such a film, producers should take a look at Joe Kelso's movie poster/resume entitled "Joe Kelso presents RESUME! The Reckoning." The multimedia specialist invites employers to, "Watch in horror as he unleashes his dastardly skills!"

18. Charting a Future
I don't really understand the information designer Greg Dizzia details in his CV chart, but it's visually inspiring. The graphics must have made sense to employers, however, as Dizzia landed a cool job as Creative Director for a design firm in Montreal.

19. Flower Power
One of the prettiest resumes you'll see, Emily Davies created a pressed-flower and paper-strip cover page for a college class. In addition to getting a good grade, the photographer landed a job.

20. Chipping Away
Graphic designers aren't known for their writing skills any more than writers are known for their design skills. Tudor Deleanu's resume, composed of layered Pantone color chips, is visually arresting. The artist would have been wise to use spell check.

21. Google Mapped
Ed Hamilton integrated his resume into an interactive Google Map you have to visit to believe.

22. Advertise Me
Print advertising from the 1950s is always a hoot, with its hackneyed graphics and basic layouts. Graphic designer Chuck D. Lay (love that name) put a twist on these ads with a resume in the red, black and pink inks of 1950s newspapers.

23. Pocked-Sized CV
London-based architect/designer Temitope Shoda, created the much imitated "Pocket CV," a collapsible portfolio/resume combo that's easy to transport and hard to forget.

24. Aiming for the Clouds
Those in the know are familiar with word clouds/word tags, in which multi-colored key words are splashed across a simple background. Typographers have gone nuts over word clouds as it allows them to mix fonts willy nilly. Amita Gandhi filled her word cloud with resume key words, with an emphasis on priority terms. Jonathan Stone cleverly used the same concept for his business card.

25. Internet Meme
Sometimes creativity isn't all that good, particularly when a job hunter stretches his accomplishments just a teensy bit. Aleksey Vayner's video resume, "Impossible is Nothing," (no longer available on the Internet) became a meme phenomenon in 2006. For some reason, it didn't land him a job.

The self-styled "CEO and Professional Athlete" variously claimed the Dalai Lama wrote his college recommendation letter; he worked for the CIA; forged passports for the Russian Mafia; is certified to handle nuclear waste; taught Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford how to play tennis; and was the original developer of Napster.

Vayner's video quickly became the source of infinite YouTube parodies, most notably the "How I Met Your Mother" video entitled "Barney Stinson's Awesome" and actor Michael Cera's wood-faced "Impossible is the Opposite of Possible."

Visit DeviantArt.com for more samples of practical, impractical and template resumes. If you're looking for a straight-forward resume with a touch of style, EasyJob.com will help you build a resume and slot the information into one of more than 25,000 templates.

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Photo by: Pvera