Love ‘em or hate ‘em infographic representations are popping up everywhere, covering everything from competitive eating to hacked Twitter accounts. So, is the humble two page CV next on the list for mainstream data visualisation re-representation?

The emergence of infographics as a CV format…

Guru receives anything from 5-8k applications per week, so I like to think that we sit pretty close to the front row when it comes to monitoring jobseeker trends. The insight we collect underpins key decisions on advertising and engagement strategies, helping us drive application effectiveness and ROI within the business. All very nice, but what does all this have to do with infographic CVs?  Well, we keep noticing them and have made the following observations…

First observation: Typically, only designers or social marketing professionals opt for infographics CVs

This sort of makes sense as data visualisation is centric to what these people do to make a living. Referring to old reports and input from our digital gurus (the social/talent acquisition team), it is quite rare for us to see an infographic CV outside of these job types.

Second observation: Infographic CVs are on the rise

We are talking fractions but we are definitely noticing more of them. Taking a sample from last quarter, our results showed 0.25% of applications were in an infographic format, compared to less than 0.1% from the same period last year. OK, not industry changing numbers, but is this an indication of things to come or just a bi-product from the increased popularity in social marketing roles?

Either way, infographics don’t appear to be going away and with the introduction of mainstream data visualisation tools I expect we are going to be seeing a lot more of them too. Take for example Job Lander, an iPhone app that can instantly convert employment and academic information into a graphical timeline for your CV, or, Visual.ly, a social infographic sharing site with tools that can help create superb visualisations in minutes. Simple tools like these and many others are opening the world of infographics up to the masses making the process of creating an infographic CV easy and accessible, but is this a good thing?

Well, putting this subject out to my HR and Recruitment connections on Twitter (hashtag #InfographicCV) resulted in divided opinion, while some agreed that they can look visually great, others found them frustrating, hard to read and incompatible with ATS / Recruitment systems. What people did seem to agree on was that a CV should be there to spark a conversation, grab interest and say look, I am here and the right match for your job. If an infographic CV can get this information across faster and clearer, then it has succeeded, if not, then it will only succeed in isolating the very people it was meant to impress.

A well written CV, relevant to the vacancy it is intended for, will always stand out regardless of any graphical interpretations. I suppose relevancy is the underlying key point here, the best applications are always the most relevant ones infographic CV or not. Relevancy is the golden rule of jobseeking.

So, before the next generation of jobseekers embark on CV enhancements they should ask themselves this question… Simplifying complexity, does this form part of my job role? If the answer is yes then an infographic CV could work in your favour, for everyone else, the humble two page CV is just fine.

Find more amazing CVs here: 13 Highly Slick and Professional CV Templates, 12 Brilliant CV Designs, Jeff Scardino and his amazing Non CV, Creative CVs and The Wine Label CV Also keep tabs on our Pinterest board (Not Your Average CVs – #NotYourAverageCVs).