Tools to Make Your Resume Look Better

First impressions count, and hiring managers usually get their first glimpse of you when they see your resume. In addition to your talent and experience, your resume's professional layout, online accessibility and stylized appearance get noticed by employers, says Allison Stadd in an article for Careerizm. Even if you don't have graphic design skills, you can create a stellar resume with free or low-cost digital tools.

Savvy marketing professionals know that images are more influential than text because people think in terms of pictures, not in text. ResumUP pulls your data from LinkedIn or Facebook and creates a graphic image that gives employers a visual picture of your overall skills, background and accomplishments in one glance. This digital tool is designed to catch and hold the interest of hiring managers.

Visualize.me is another digital tool that allows you to present your skills and experience visually to prospective employers in a colorful and stylish chart format. Taking data from your LinkedIn profile, it creates graphs that display your background information in the form of quantifiers across time. For example, you could show your job roles, dollar amounts of profit you earned or other measurable achievements you accomplished for various companies on the timeline of your years of employment.

Graphics that paint a picture of your professional qualifications boost your visibility and make a lasting impression, but a resume in text format is still a standard requirement for getting a job. Kukook makes it easy for you to format your own resume professionally when you purchase one of its templates designed with stylish layouts, fonts and just the right amount of color and graphic elements. These templates are set up with relevant sections and headings so you can strategically organize your resume to showcase your professional qualifications.

If you're a hands-on person, and you want to add a touch of personal creativity to your resume, try Creddle. This free digital tool takes your information from LinkedIn, or you can manually enter it in your choice of nine templates. Add or change colors, headings and sections to suit your preferences. Once you've created your resume, Creddle lets you print it or export it in DOCX and PDF formats and share it online; it also generates a stylistically coordinated cover letter template.

A major advantage of putting your resume into a professional, stylish format with VisualCV is its compatibility with the digital resume software used by many Fortune 500 companies. VisualCV's multimedia capabilities let you add presentations, images and videos to your resume. It maintains multiple versions to target different jobs and allows you to print and post your resume online. For an annual fee, this digital tool provides advanced features that include tracking IP addresses that have viewed your resume, additional resume templates and maintaining unlimited versions of your resume.

If you can't decide which digital tool you'd like to use to make employers react positively when they see your resume, there's no reason to limit yourself to just one. Since most of them work with LinkedIn, setting up a profile makes it fast and easy for you to take advantage of these powerful resume-enhancing, job-getting tools.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net