The most coveted jobs in interior designing have thousands of applicants lining up. You can make your mark and beat the competition with a resume that stands out.
The errors in your Interior Designer Resume could become a hurdle between you and your desired job.
There’s no such thing as a perfect resume but it is possible to get your resume closer to perfection with the help of a couple of tricks.
These 5 tips are a great place to start:
- Your resume should be well organized
Fixing the structure will help you create an aesthetically pleasing resume. Your resume should be easy on the eyes and should be formulated in such a way that it projects information in a correct sequence.
When it comes to crafting an interior designer resume that stands out, it is important to ensure that it does the bare minimum of presenting important information in a well-organized manner.
This is why it’s important to organize the information in your resume under relevant sections.
Doing this will help your resume direct the recruiter’s attention to particular pieces of information that they may be explicitly looking for.
Here’s a list of must-have sections that your interior designer resume should have:
- Header
- Personal Information
- Profile Title
- Key Skills
- Summary
- Professional Experience
- Education
- Certifications
In addition to the sections we have mentioned above, if you have information that does not fall under any of these categories, you can also group them under the sections listed below:
- Internship
- Awards & Recognition
- Publications
- Additional Information
Doing this bare minimum will keep your resume clean and readable.
Let us now discuss the next tip.
- Your resume should be clean of basic blunders
Nothing is more disappointing to a recruiter than seeing pieces of information that are just not needed.
A resume that is full of easily avoidable blunders is nothing short of a nightmare to a recruiter who has to go through the herculean task of evaluating thousands of resumes in a single day.
The secret to getting that shortlist is to have a recruiter on your side.
Let’s not forget the six seconds rule here. On average, a recruiter takes 6 seconds to evaluate a resume. This means that they take these 6 seconds to decide if your resume is even worth the read or not.
Your interior designer resume is already destined for doom if it looks haywire where the basics are concerned.
So here’s a list of things to avoid while drafting your interior designer resume:
- Do not label your interior designer resume as “CV” or “Resume”. The fact that your resume is a resume is implicit. It does not have to be mindlessly reiterated. Instead, write your name on the extreme top part of your resume. This will tell the recruiter in one go that it belongs to you.
- Use your name to save your resume: The first step of a job application demands that you send a resume. This resume is sent over email either in a pdf format or a word format. Either way, make sure that you use your name to label your resume. Example: Alexa_Interior_Designer.
- Relevance is key: Your resume should make sense to anyone going through it. Organizing it in a reverse timeline order helps you attain this.
- Avoid using a summary at all costs: Nothing should be in your resume in a paragraph form, except the summary. Everything else should be articulated using points. This holds true for the professional experience and internship sections in particular.
- Do not clutter your resume with useless pieces of information: If you’ve gotten yourself into the habit of mindlessly flooding your resume with trivial data such as your marital status, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, etc. It’s time to stop. Avoid these details unless explicitly asked to do so.
- Your resume should be ATS-Compliant
ATS a.k.a the Applicant Tracking System is a software that helps screen candidates based on a certain set of parameters. To beat this system, you need to modify your resume to beat the bots.
Success with the ATS means a higher chance at shortlist success.
If your resume is not ATS-compliant, using relevant keywords can help.
Keywords are particular criterias that an organization looks for in the ideal candidate.
The job description of the jobs you are targeting will have keywords. Your job here is to identify them and incorporate the relevant keywords in your resume.
For example, keywords for an interior designer job can be identified in the following manner:
- Situation 1: A job description mentions that they are looking for Interior Designers with over 2 years of work experience.
- The keyword here is 2+ years of work experience. Let’s say you meet the criteria, mention this keyword in your resume.
- Situation 2: A job description mentions that they are looking for certified Interior Designers.
- The keyword here is certified and certifications. In this case, make sure that you present your certifications.
- Situation 3: A job description mentions that they are looking for Interior Designers with basic drawing, architecture, and design layout skills.
- The keywords here are “drawing”, “architecture”, and “design layout”. If you have these skill-sets, highlight them in bold under a seperate key skills section in your resume.
- Your work experience details should be impeccably presented
The crux of your resume lies in your professional journey. More specifically, it lies in how well you present the details of your career trajectory in your resume.
You get the freedom to make the most of this in the professional experience section of your resume. This is the section that matters most because this is where you get the chance to talk about your work experience, the skills you have amassed during your professional journey, and the meaningful results that you have brought using your skills.
Perfect this section, and you’ll have the interior design job of your dreams in no time.
Follow the below-mentioned steps to make your professional experience shine:
- Use one-liner points:
The details of your roles & responsibilities within each organization you have worked at should be effectively articulated using one-liner bulleted points instead of paragraphs.
Doing this helps enhance the readability of your resume which increases the likelihood of your resume being evaluated more than just 6 seconds.
- Bucketing & Bolding:
Your resume will look cluttered if it does a shabby job at presenting information.
While using one-liner points to present your work details is a great tactic, listing 5 or more points without any line breaks and thoughtful bifurcation is not advisable.
Moreover, since a recruiter only spends 6 seconds on your resume, clubbing similar points under relevant subheadings makes your resume easy to comprehend. It also tells the recruiter your main expertise areas in one go.
So make sure that you group similar points under unique subheadings and bold the key achievement points and career highlights within each point by marking them in bold.
- Use numbers to quantify your achievements:
A third and most important tactic for enhancing the details of your roles & responsibilities is using numbers wherever you can.
Your expertise holds no weight if you can’t meaningfully articulate its utility. This is why using performance figures is a great way to make an impact on a potential recruiter.
- Your resume should showcase your skills
You cannot call yourself an interior designer if you don’t have specific skill-sets that are unique to an Interior Designer. Your skills are yardsticks based on which your suitability for a particular job is evaluated.
The interior designing job you are applying for requires a particular set of skills and expertise. If you have those highlighted in your resume, you will get one-step closer to your desired job.
Your resume will lose momentum if you don’t highlight your interior designer skills in your resume with the right objectivity and precision.
Not only should your resume outline your skills, but it should also be extremely visible.
Without visibility, your skills will get unnoticed and you will lose out on a potential job offer just because the recruiter did not have the patience to explicitly look for your skills.
To make your resume shine, outline your skill sets under a distinct “Key Skills” section in your Interior Designer Resume.
Here’s an example of how you should showcase your skills in your resume:
Key Takeaways:
To sum up:
- Organize information under relevant sections.
- Avoid common resume blunders.
- Use keywords to increase your shortlist chances.
- Present your work experience details in a one-liner point and further organize them using bucketing & bolding. Moreover, quantify your achievements wherever possible.
- Highlight your skills under a distinct section in your Interior Designer Resume.
Author’s Bio:
Aditya Sharma
On a quest to help professionals across the world land their dream jobs, Aditya lives and breathes
Hiration — an AI-powered online resume builder and platform to help job-seekers find their way in the
treacherous job market — where he’s a Co-Founder and the unofficial CPO (Chief Problem-solving
Officer). He likes to code away his days and nights when he’s not busy disrupting the career space.