Implementation of Indiana’s Order of Selection for VR services will begin August 1. That means your agency and staff will partner with those job seekers who VR regards as having a “most significant disability.” People with the most significant disabilities, including physical and communication challenges, often experience additional barriers to employment, because they have difficulty representing themselves and demonstrating competence or their ability to contribute when meeting employers. Visual resumes allow job seekers to show an employer what they’ve accomplished and what they can do.Breaking Down Barriers & Making Your Job Easier
A visual resume not only assists your job seeker, it can also give job developers a competitive edge. If you’re responsible for job development, you’ll need to balance the use of sales and marketing strategies with the need to represent people as individuals who have unique contributions and skills. The gap between sales and individual representation is the visual resume.Placement can be a daunting task that is sometimes even more complicated when a job seeker has behaviors or traits of disability that are obvious. Sometimes it’s difficult for people to see beyond those obvious impacts of a disability. Humans tend to categorize people when they are very different from “typical,” and employers are humans. The visual resume can help counter employer resistance and bring about understanding: “Different” is not a liability, but an asset!
Visual resumes hold so much potential, in fact, that Wisconsin is the latest state whose Vocational Rehabilitation system pays an outcome fee for its development. That’s because a visual resume can be the means of helping an employer see both what a job seeker can do as well as how that person might be able to meet the business’s employment needs, the crux of customized employment. How exciting is that?!
When Demonstration Beats Conversation
So, what is a visual resume? It’s a customized, visual presentation of your job seeker – that’s it! You can use PowerPoint or another type of presentation software or video to introduce your job seeker to an employer and to “show off” your candidate at his/her best.How people are represented to employers frequently makes a difference in whether a person gets a job or not. According to Marc Gold & Associates, “When the visual resume was pilot tested in 20 states across the country, the feedback from employers was that it increased their comfort level with hiring someone with a disability and enabled them to see a person with a disability within their business.”
Visual resumes can be especially helpful for job seekers who have:
- little to no formal work experience.
- clearly obvious and overt impacts of disability.
- difficulty expressing themselves in conversation.
With pictures, video, and text, the visual resume highlights and demonstrates:
- strengths
- work experiences (both formal and informal)
- tasks performed and skills demonstrated during these work experiences
- interests
- work-related skills
- a customized task list of potential contributions (used as the basis for negotiating a customized job description)
- certificates, recommendations
Visuals are important! You should collect pictures and videos throughout the Discovery process and pull them together as a wrap-up or summary of what you’ve learned about your job seeker. If you remember to take pictures and discrete videos throughout Discovery, visual resume development doesn’t take much time!
Resource Time!
Start with this Visual Resume Builder guide. Keep in mind, while you may use a standard template (PowerPoint), each visual resume will be as unique as each job seeker.Next, watch this video to get an idea of how an Indiana employment specialist uses a visual resume for her client, Mark. And listen as Mark describes how a visual resume can help a potential employer understand who he is and what he can do.
For reference, here's Mark's complete visual resume.
And finally, there are lots of examples of visual and video resume examples on the internet. Do a search to find inspiration. We thought you might enjoy Elizabeth J.'s creative video resume.
