How do you make your resume stand out visually without overdoing it?
Keep it simple
Put most relevant experience at the top - for the position you’re applying for.
They don’t want to read that you worked part-time in a sweet shop when you were 15.
Keep relevance near the top and experience and courses in very simple layout.
Then other relevant experience after all this - or other courses.
Show courses you’ve completed neatly, and date them, so they can see that you’re actively engaged in further learning, or not.
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As Smurf says keep it simple but interesting with nice portfolio and not so much stuff. Don’t talk so much about yourself and don’t add so much topic, just your best skills and show them what you are be able to do !. Always if you get an interview with a company, make a research of them and what they are looking for and show the best on your portfolio.
Keep your resume simple and easy to read. Do not decorate it with needless graphics. Your portfolio is where you make an impression with your creativity. Your resume is where you want to impress people with your education, previous experience, skills, and what you can do for the potential employer.
In addition to the information your resume contains, it’s your chance to demonstrate that you know the difference between the times when creative impact is appropriate and when a simple, straightforward layout works best.
If you submit your resume to a company with more than two or three hundred employees, it will likely have a human resources (HR) department. When that’s the case, your resume will be first screened by the HR people who are not designers. They will look for keywords indicating you meet the minimum qualifications for the job and assign a score to your qualifications based on those keywords. The higher-scoring resumes get passed along to the art or marketing director. The lower-scoring resumes are rejected without anyone ever looking at your portfolio.
In larger companies, this process is usually handled by software that converts your resume into a simple text document. Instead of people evaluating your resume, software algorithms check and score it. Rejected resumes are never even read by a human. This alone is a compelling reason to keep your resume simple, clean, well-structured, and devoid of any superfluous complexities that might garble the information and confuse the software.
And this may just be my own pet peeve, but I despise the trend of "skill bars’ on resumes (hmm, apparently I am not the only one)
They are wholly subjective and meaningless. It is a random self assessment of how skilled you are in software, an application, other skills. I’d rather see using terms such as “novice” in parentheses next to skills that you do not excel or are competent in using. But a weird random skill bar that shows you are 87% good at say PhotoShop, means absolutely nothing. Because it is just you arbitrarily assigning a number to your skill based on your own assessment. And, what is the difference between (for example) an 87% and a 91%?
I agree with @Just-B. As he mentioned more and more companies use AI or computer based screening. If your resume cannot be parsed or read well, it will automatically get binned.
That is not to say that you cannot create something that is nicely designed, but IMO it should be clean. There are always exceptions, but in general I think you’re better off erring on the side of caution.
To me, if your resume is solid, then it is your portfolio that will help you stand out.