How to Build a Resume That Stands Out Visually To Help Your Teen Land Their First Job

Creating a captivating resume that sparkles bright enough to catch an employer's attention is an art on its own terms.

With the ramp up pressure kids experience at school and the need to sign up to too many extracurricular activities, it’s no surprise how the number of teens employed have been declining over the past decades.

There are many benefits (and risks) of adolescent employment. The decision to allow your teen to have an after school job should be a well thought-out family decision based on how well they can manage responsibilities, time management and money.

But if your teen is ready to take the plunge the first thing they need to figure out is how to build a resume that stands out even if they don’t have any work experience.

But where to start? How do can you create a snapshot of your ambitions, show your strengths and interests and captive an employers attention?

This is the part Canvas comes in and rescues the day. If you are unfamiliar Canvas, this is a graphic-design tool website that uses a drag-and-drop format and allows you to design presentations, social media graphics, resumes and more with thousands of beautiful layouts. It is very user-friendly and used by non-designers as well as professionals.

How will Canva help me get a job?

By allowing you to create a striking eye-catching visual resume layout that will blow your socks off.

What is a visual resume you might ask? It’s an alternative way to highlight your experiences and accomplishments by mapping your career in a timeline or infographic.

A Tale Of Two Resumes

To understand how effective visual resumes are let’s compare 3 resumes from the same high school student.

Resume #1:

Minimal work experience, the focus is to get as personal as possible (hence the picture) and show a glimpse of the student general achievements. For someone with zero work experience this resume works well because the spotlight is put on their skills, personal likes, and achievements. Your first resume should always list all your extracurricular activities at school and in your community, every single leadership positions held, awards received and personal goals for the future.

Now with this type of visual resume (the information has been changed for privacy purposes) the student received interview calls left and right and it only took him one week to to sign his contract and start working.

Resume #2

The photo was removed and the format was changed back to a traditional resume since the person needed more space to update work experience and references. At this moment the person is not employed because he was hired just for a particular season. He must have applied to more than 20 openings. How many callbacks for interview he received now that the photo was removed and the resume was changed to a traditional format?  Zero! So something is definitely wrong with this one, so back to the drawing board.

Resume #3

Ditched the traditional template and went back to a visual resume format. Is this they key to getting callbacks and interview requests? Absolutely! For every application that was sent a callback was received. Mind blowing how a simple tweak can make such a huge impact.

Resume #4

This one is from a female high school student. She has a lot of extracurriculars and achievements so a different template was chosen since there was too much information that needed to be squeezed in one page.

Notice how visually striking this template is. Her educational timeline is clear, her skills are listed, as well as her professional development.

With this resume she landed a job almost immediately that she still has up to this day. She started like any other worker at the bottom, and in one year at the age of 17 she became the store key holder and the youngest person to work for the company.

Now this particular company was not open to hire teens but decided to give her the opportunity for one reason only. They couldn’t stop talking about her resume. Not everyone was keen of it, but the majority thought it was unique in a good way. Almost a year later they confessed the reason she got hired was because they were intrigued to know the person behind the one-page document. They have never seen a more a resume like hers and believed that is she is able to create something with this level of originality, she can be one heck of a worker and a great asset to the company.

After a year, the company softened their hiring requirements and allowed her to recommend other teens. Now those teens are opening doors to other high school students so the whole thing is like a gift that keeps on giving. And it all started by avoiding a traditional resume format.

The best way to understand Canva is to try it. Just go to canva.com open an account, choose a template that can fit your needs and skills you want to showcase and start editing!