The key functionality of Tableau is to create visual data insights with the help of charts. But what if I told you this functionality could extend to job hunting? That’s right, we can use Tableau’s visual abilities to create a personalized resume that stands out.
By using graphs to represent points of experience, education, or skills, you can make sure you’re different from the rest! Here’s why you should build your resume in Tableau, how to do it, as well as some impactful examples.
Note: This approach may not work for some companies if a standard pdf or doc file type is the way to submit your resume. In that instance, a regular resume is what you should submit – see our tips and templates below.
Why Build a Resume in Tableau?
Now, why would someone be interested in building a resume in Tableau rather than going the traditional way? Companies receive stacks of applications for each job posting and you have to really stand out somehow. This method can help you achieve that.
Share Your Tableau Expertise
One of the reasons why you would have a Tableau resume is because you work in the analytics world. It is an ideal way to showcase your visualization skills to potential employers before you even reach the interview. You’re almost covering the question on ‘what level of data visualization/analysis are you’ by jumping ahead and answering it before it has even been asked.
If you’re not that experienced with Tableau, but you want to learn, then maybe this could be a personal project.
Bring Potential Employers to Your Tableau Profile
As mentioned already, you get to show off your amazing visualization skills by doing something different with your resume. Since your resume will be published to your personal Tableau Public profile, it’s also a chance to showcase your other dashboarding work.
Your Tableau profile holds work produced while analyzing and visualizing the datasets of your choosing – what a great way to pitch those to a hiring manager. Be sure to make your resume a featured dashboard so that it appears as a primary item on Tableau Public.
“Hire Me” Button
In addition to having an online data analytics profile, you can also enable the “Hire Me” button. The button is for recruitment purposes, dedicated to enabling potential employers to contact you directly.
Note: Publishing your resume to Tableau Public exposes your personal information. Be careful when using personal details, such as contact information, if you do not wish this to be public. This is where the ‘Hire Me’ button comes in handy.
How to Build a Tableau Resume
1. Underlying Data Structure is Key
The starting point is to create a data structure, ideally using a spreadsheet to make this process smoother. You need to ensure that you categorize your data and provide values to display on the actual resume. This spreadsheet should be designed in a way that if your employment history changes, it is easy to update – for example, adding a completion month and year of the online course you’ve recently completed.
The example above is in an ‘Event’ structure. For every section of your resume (education, employment, skills etc.) you will filter ‘Event Category’ to represent those data points. For anything that requires additional information (where you’ve studied, worked etc.), you can add in ‘Event Detail’. It’s also useful having a score column to represent the level of skills that you hold, plus a ‘Start/End Date’ for any timeline examples.
2. Use Bar or Gantt Charts as Timelines
Using charts to represent timelines is a powerful addition to visualizing your career. A mix of employment and education is considered a great way to represent someone’s history, and it works very well if you have been in employment and/or taken courses.
Some also add in skills into the mix, such as: “during my time taking this online course I gained coding skills”.
3. Link Helpful Information
In Tableau, you can create several sections where you are able to link key additional information like contact links, featured visualizations, or other resources. The key is to do it the right way – fitting in the useful information without it being overwhelming for the reader.
- Contact links: Your professional profiles such as LinkedIn, Tableau, your current work, etc.
- Featured visualizations: Add in a section for your most trending Tableau Public visuals. If you have a piece that was featured in Viz of the day, it’s a great idea to include that.
- Other resources: Anything else related to your professional career like featured articles, your business venture, book that you’ve written, etc.
4. Use Tooltips
Having very long resumes is not helpful and can overwhelm the reviewer rather than being impactful.
Tooltips can be used in your Tableau resume to include additional information, e.g. topic of your university thesis, favorite charitable work, why you achieved an award. This means you don’t cram all the information in one page – instead, you have an additional layer of information readily available but hidden from first view.
5. Focus On One Page
This one is quite straightforward – focus on making your document one page. There is no need to have multiple dashboard pages, one has more than enough space to show your professional history.
If you feel you have a lot to say (or show), then utilize features such as tooltips or filters and hidden sheets.
6. Consider Resume Types
As with your standard resume, for your Tableau resume you should know what type you want to go with: Chronological, Functional, Combination, or Targeted. This will help you to understand the structure and what charts to use to represent your employability data.
Consider understanding how to create a Salesforce related resume and applying that to a Tableau resume.
7. Remember the Basics
As with any other resume you have to stick to the usual advice such as:
- Use warm colors (but avoid using too many colors).
- Stick to one type of font.
- Use one (consistent) size for titles, subtitles, and text.
- Not all information needs to be added – only use what is relevant
- Check your spelling. Then double check!
Resume Examples
Here are some resume examples for you to download and edit:
You don’t have to create a resume from scratch. Download and edit resume templates above or use the Interactive Resume Gallery to look through already developed and published ones. You can use the great work that members of the Tableau community have created, by downloading resume dashboards and applying them to your own profile.
Summary
In a nutshell, a Tableau resume is an alternative and fun way (for those visualization geeks) to represent your professional history. One of the key purposes of it is to represent your analytical skills to future employers early in the recruitment process. It is still a resume and you should pay attention to how the reader will receive this information, then use Tableau’s functionalities to aid you.