# Resume — First Draft — 5 points **Due: Week 7 — Friday, October 9 — bring it printed AND on screen** **Submit: PDF in Canvas before your conference** --- ## The premise **Your resume does not get you the job. Your portfolio does.** The resume has one job: survive the first cut and produce a click. That's it. Every decision below follows from that. It has to satisfy two readers who want opposite things. ## Reader one: the machine Applicant tracking systems — Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS and similar — parse, score, and rank your resume before a human sees it. Two things you've probably been told that are wrong: - **"The ATS auto-rejects most resumes."** It doesn't. It ranks and surfaces; a human still chooses what to read. Bad formatting buries you, it doesn't delete you. - **"Stuff it with keywords."** That stopped working years ago. Modern systems use semantic matching — "cross-functional coordination" already matches "project management." Stuffing now reads as noise and can lower your score. What actually helps: **using the posting's exact job title** where it's honest to do so, a real overlap of hard-skill terms (roughly 10–15% of the posting's language, not a keyword dump), and clean structure. **Mechanical rules — non-negotiable:** - One column. No text boxes, no tables, no icons, no images. - Contact info **in the body**, never in the header/footer region — parsers skip it there. - Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Not "Where I've Been." - Standard body face, 10–12 pt. - PDF unless the posting says otherwise. Filename: `Lastname_Firstname_Resume.pdf` - One page. ## Reader two: the human Twelve to twenty seconds. Looking for three things: can you do *this* job, have you done something like it under real constraints, are you a low-risk hire. ## The design paradox You are an art student, so you want to make this a portfolio piece. **This costs people jobs.** The target is quiet competence: one typeface family, two weights, consistent spacing, generous margins, ruthless alignment. The typographic discipline *is* the demonstration. Anything that reads as a flex reads as someone who doesn't know what the document is for. Specifically: no skill percentage bars. "Maya 87%" is the most mocked convention in this industry and it means nothing to anyone. ## The link block Directly under your name, before anything else. This is the part student resumes fumble most: ``` FIRST LAST Portfolio: firstlast.com · Reel: vimeo.com/… (1:12) · linkedin.com/in/firstlast [email protected] · Frisco, TX · Open to on-site / hybrid / remote ``` - Test every link in a private browsing window before you send it. **A resume without a working portfolio link is dead on arrival.** - Give the reel's runtime. It lowers the cost of clicking. - State your location and whether you'll relocate — it's the second thing a recruiter checks. - Professional email address. Retire the one from middle school. ## Bullet architecture — the actual work > **verb + object + tool/technique + constraint + outcome** | Weak | Strong | |---|---| | Created 3D models for a student game project. | Modeled and textured 14 hero props for a 6-person UE5 student title under a 4,000-triangle budget; shipped on itch.io with 1,200 downloads. | | Responsible for character animation. | Animated a 22-shot cycle set (idle, walk, run, three attacks) for a third-person prototype; delivered on a two-week sprint cadence with weekly lead review. | | Worked on team projects. | Coordinated asset handoff between four artists and two programmers; built the naming and version convention the team used through delivery. | | Skilled in Adobe Creative Suite. | *(delete — belongs in Skills, tiered honestly)* | **Constraint is the credibility signal.** Juniors describe activity. Hires describe constraints met. Triangle budgets, texel density, sprint length, shot count, file size caps, team size, review cadence — these prove you've worked inside something resembling a pipeline. ## You have no industry experience. Neither does anyone else in the room. - **Class projects are projects.** Describe them by what was made and constrained. Don't disguise coursework as employment — and don't apologize for it either. - **Team size is experience.** "Six-person team" tells a lead something real. - **Self-directed work counts if it shipped** — published, playable, screened, downloadable. - **Game jams count double.** They prove you finish under a clock. - **Non-art jobs count for what they prove.** Retail: customer conflict, reliability. Food service: throughput under pressure. Warehouse: process compliance. One line each, at the bottom, framed for the transferable trait. - **The floor:** never inflate a title, never claim credit on a shipped title you didn't work on, never list software you couldn't be tested on. An art test will find the lie, and this industry is small enough locally that the story travels. ## The skills list, tiered Three honest bands, labeled on the page: - **Production-ready** — hand me a task in this today - **Working knowledge** — I can do it with reference and time - **Familiar** — I've used it; don't test me on it This looks vulnerable and is the strongest signal on the page. It tells a lead you know the difference, which is itself a professional skill. ## Section order for a junior artist Name + link block → two-line summary *(only if it says something specific — otherwise delete it)* → Skills → **Projects** → Education → Experience → Awards / Exhibitions / Screenings. Projects go above Education when the projects are stronger than the credential. For most of you, they are. ## Before you submit: the 15-second test Hand it to a classmate. They read it for fifteen seconds, turn it face down, and tell you what they remember. Anything they can't recall gets cut, moved up, or rewritten. ## Rubric | | Points | |---|---| | One page, one column, machine-readable, correctly named PDF | 1 | | Complete link block with tested, live links | 1 | | Bullets follow the pattern — at least four carry a real constraint or outcome | 1 | | Skills tiered honestly; nothing listed you couldn't be tested on | 1 | | Typographically disciplined; no bars, icons, photos, or objective statement | 1 | ## What happens next Your Week 7 conference is a **line edit**. I mark up the printed copy, bullet by bullet. Bring a pen. The **Resume Final** (Week 11) must be visibly restructured and must include one tailored variant aimed at a real posting from your Target List. Five weeks between draft and final, so the revision is an actual revision. ## Related - Week 6 page — the full resume session - **Professional Identity Kit** (Week 8) — LinkedIn, bio, outreach note, target list - Glossary: *ATS, semantic matching, hard skills, tailoring, art test*