It’s an interesting article discussing how we spend hours on the visual impact of our portofolio’s, carefully selecting the best sketches, product shots etc… that show us of in the best possible light… Yet as Michael put’s it the resume gets no visual love. Which I agree with.
But does it need to? Save it for your portfolio.
I guess it comes down to what we perceive a designers CV to be. Is it about where he has worked and his skillset? (which you could argue is allready shown in the portfolio). Or is a designer’s cv actually about trying to decide whether the person is a good fit. If it’s the latter is the text based cv the best way to go?
It’s the facts about your career so far as soundbites, a bulletpointed list of your skills. Almost your wikipedia entry as you were. So I think you should stick to text and save the creativity for your portfolio
I appreciate there are many potential pitfalls here… If HR were to receive a graphical cv I imagine it would be equivalant to handing them a document writen in martian… by an illeterate martian
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This, to me, is why a graphical cv is risky. So many companies nowadays don’t even have human beings read resumes, they put it through a computer which looks for keywords. If you don’t have those keywords in your cv, you ain’t getting through to the next stage. If you send a format that can’t be put through the software then it will go in the bin. I think when you write a cv you need to be thinking like an SEO expert not a designer. The HR person or software is your Google Bot. 
I also understand that you can still make your text based CV graphically pleasing. I guess what I am posing (or rather Michael is) as a discusion topic is that is the text cv for designers approrpiate. Should we be simply listing our experience’s? Or should designers use that space to try and explain who we are and why we would be a good fit for a potential employee.
The cv is the place to express your creativity with good copy. The portfolio is the place to express your creativity with design.
So how would you, (as senior designers or those who oversea the recruitment of new staff) react to a “graphical cv”? More importantly should we be looking a shift in the designers cv…
Probably more annoying than anything else. Anything that means you have to spend more time sifting through it to find the facts is a waste of time.
Just to add - something I’ve always noticed with many designers, you can see it in their cv, their portfolio or their website - they write these things as if they are targetting other designers. The people that see your site, your cv, your Linked In, the people that will be employing you or contracting you are not usually other designers. They are business people. You need to think like them in order to attract their attention.
So, no good sending a resume as a psd file, they won’t have Adobe software, they’ll probably be on a pc, or using a Blackberry. No good using designer talk, see things from their perspective, make things easier for them, some of them can struggle to understand portfolios or to ‘read’ them (especially recruiters I’ve found), they may not be ‘visual’ people like we designers are, so the well written resume may be thing that draws their attention more than anything graphical ever will.
In a nutshell, hedge your bets, ensure that what you send out can be understood by all.
To conclude: shout me down if you like (and maybe I am just old LOL) but I think these visual resumes are awful. They take too long to figure out. They don’t tell me the facts that I need as an employer. I shouldn’t need to contact you after I’ve seen the resume to find out how long you worked at ‘x’ and what your responsibilities were. I don’t need to be seeing a graph that explains you are twice as interested in cars now than you were in 2008. (WTF did they put that in there for lol?) They look like a load of noise with no facts to me. Most of them seem to be by IT tech developer guys, not industrial designers? Perhaps there is more appeal there, these guys really do think in pie charts (my brother the app developer does anyway!)
Perhaps there is a challenge for us there? Don’t can the traditional resume but figure out a way of representing your career in a visual and factual way? Could this be sent out with the resume in place of the normal pdf portfolio?