Should UX designers still tell their story in their resume?

A question I’ve been sitting with after too many mentorship conversations that all sounded the same.

For the past few months, almost every mentorship session has landed on the same question in some form.

“Should I reformat my resume to pass the ATS?”

“I heard two-column layouts don’t get read. Do I need to strip mine down?”

“If the AI is filtering us first, does creativity even matter anymore?”

I don’t have a perfect answer for them. I’m not a recruiter, and I haven’t personally tested ATS systems. What I do have is a growing discomfort with where these conversations are taking us.

As UX designers, we’re trained to communicate through hierarchy, storytelling, structure, and visual thinking. For many of us, our resume was one of the first pieces of design work a hiring manager saw.

The layout showed how we think about hierarchy.
The typography showed our sense of voice.
The editing showed what we considered important.

Our resumes were never neutral. They were a small artifact of who we are as designers.

What happens when a system needs to understand our experience before a human ever gets the chance to?

And that leaves me with a question I keep coming back to after I close my laptop after a mentorship session: if UX designers stop telling their story in their resumes, do we lose something we actually need?

Maybe the answer isn’t choosing between creativity and ATS-friendly structure. Maybe the real question is how we design one career story for two very different users.

The tension we’re actually navigating

For most job seekers, “optimize your resume for ATS” sounds relatively straightforward. Right keywords. Clean formatting. Single column. Done.

For designers, it’s not that simple — because our resume was never just a document listing jobs. It was one of the first pieces of design work someone saw from us. Layout signaled how we think about hierarchy. Typography signaled voice. Editing signaled judgment. Our resumes were never neutral.

Strip all that out to make the parser happy, and you might get past the system. You also strip out the thing that used to differentiate you.

There’s a real risk on the other side of over-optimizing, too. A few weeks ago I read a piece by Elodie Aishwarya P. Remoissenet at Barkley Labs, where she let AI rewrite her real resume into a fully optimized version and scored both against multiple ATS tools. The scores reflected how well each version matched the criteria used by those particular tools — not whether one resume represented a stronger candidate.

That experiment made me question something I hadn’t before: if a heavily optimized resume can score at least as well as a real career, what is the score actually measuring? Follow that optimization advice all the way through and you become what I’ve started calling the gold-plated candidate. Technically flawless. Indistinguishable from everyone else who took the same advice.

You can become highly searchable while becoming completely forgettable. That’s the trap most current advice ignores.

Your resume now has two interfaces

Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to: we already know how to design for multiple users. Our resumes need the same thinking.

Interface one is the machine layer. It needs to understand facts. Clear structure. Recognizable job titles. Standard section headings. Explicit skills. Clear dates. Text where text belongs, not embedded in graphics. A clearly written portfolio URL that is easy for a recruiter to find.

This layer isn’t asking you to keyword-stuff. It’s asking you not to make the system guess. If you’ve done usability testing, call it usability testing. If you’ve worked with design systems, call it design systems. Don’t hide functional terms behind clever writing a parser can’t decode.

Interface two is the human layer. A recruiter scanning. A hiring manager opening the PDF. Someone deciding whether your experience is worth exploring further. This reader wants what the system can’t measure: voice, judgment, a sense of who you are.

Most optimization advice collapses these two readers into one. That’s how you get the gold-plated candidate — flawless in the database, indistinguishable outside it.

Design for both. Clean enough to parse. Designed enough to be remembered.

Creativity didn’t disappear. It moved to storytelling.

When designers hear “creative resume,” we think layout. Two-column structures. Custom typography. Icons. Skill meters. Color palettes.

Those are visual expressions of creativity. Not the only ones.

We also create through information architecture, content hierarchy, framing, editing — what stays, what gets cut — and the specific language we use to describe our work. Those forms of creativity are harder to automate away. They survive a parser that can’t handle a two-column layout.

The resume might become visually quieter. Your thinking doesn’t have to.

And this is exactly where the storytelling matters most. Not through visual flourish — through the specific evidence and framing you choose. That’s what turns a resume from a keyword list back into design work.

Try this: an evidence map

Here’s an exercise I use with mentees. It reframes the whole resume update process — from “what keywords do I need?” to “what evidence do I have for what they’re asking?”

Take the job description. Pull out the requirements they’re actually naming. Then for each one, work through three questions:

• What they need → what’s the requirement in the job description?
• My evidence → what specific project or role in my career demonstrates it?
• Where I’ll show it → summary line, experience bullet, or portfolio?

Work through this for three types of things they typically ask for:

• A hard skill or method they name — the specific project or role that shows it → experience bullet
• A leadership or collaboration signal — the moment or context that demonstrates it → summary line
• A domain or industry expectation — the relevant background you have → experience bullet or portfolio

You fill it in yourself. That’s the point of the exercise. You look at each requirement in the job description and ask: have I actually done this? Where in my career? How do I make that findable in my resume?

Two things happen when you do this.

First, it protects you from keyword-stuffing. You’re not padding your resume with terms you can’t back up. Every keyword lands next to real evidence.

Second, it changes what your bullets do. A weak bullet describes an activity — “designed wireframes.” A strong one carries a small story — the problem you faced, what you did, what changed. Not every bullet needs to be a full narrative. But across the resume, someone should be able to reconstruct how you actually work.

If a bullet just says “designed wireframes,” it’s parseable but it doesn’t tell anyone anything. If a bullet says what you were solving and what shifted because of it, the machine gets its keywords AND the human gets a story. That’s designing for both interfaces.

Three questions before you send

I don’t hand out formulas anymore. Too much is uncertain. I ask three things instead:

Can the system read what you’ve done? Standard section headings, single column, clean fonts, real keywords. These are cheap to add.

Can a recruiter quickly see why you’re relevant to this role? Not “have you used the right words.” Have you shown evidence of what they’re actually asking for.

Would a hiring manager remember something specific about you after closing the tab? Voice in your bullets. Editing choices in what you included and left out. A point of view about the kind of designer you are.

If all three feel true, that’s usually enough. More optimization past that point tends to make the resume more generic, not more visible.

Design for both

Designers spent years being told that everything about how we present information matters — hierarchy, typography, layout, editing, voice, all part of the craft. Now we’re being told to strip all of that out of the one document that represents us to hiring systems.

I don’t think we should.

Design resumes that respect the parser without disappearing into it. Treat ATS as a design constraint, not a design directive. Keep the storytelling — because we’re the ones telling the story of a designer, and if we won’t do it, nobody else will either.

The tools will change. The scoring systems will change. But one thing hasn’t: someone, eventually, still has to decide that your experience is worth knowing more about.

The first reader is the system. The next one, if we’re lucky, is still a person.

Design for both.

If any of this resonated — or if you disagree — I’d like to hear it.

Should UX designers still tell their story in their resume? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.