Review: Resume Designer Pro for iOS makes your resume look professional
With the condition of the economy being what it is, many people are on the hunt for new and better career opportunities. Along with a job application comes the need for a new or updated résumé, and there are lots of options in the App Store to help ease your way toward getting that résumé polished and ready to go.
Resume Designer Pro is a US$6.99 universal app that walks you through filling in personal information and then provides a variety of formats to meet your design goals.
The app has 16 résumé designs, but I was thrown by seeing only three examples. It isn't immediately clear if there are only three templates, and you have to do a bit of searching to find the actual designs.
Résumés can be shared via email or exported to PDF (more about that later). The app has support for sending résumés to Dropbox, G-Drive and iBook. The latter location, of course, supports storage of PDF documents, meaning that you can keep a copy of your résumés in iBooks for future reference. The app lets you include a cover letter and it is easy to re-edit a résumé to make it fit a particular job.
Having said that, there are some issues with Resume Designer Pro that may keep it from gaining wide acceptance. First, many job sites won't take a PDF résumé -- they usually require something in a Microsoft Word .doc format, so that's a pretty major problem for some job seekers. Second, the app is pretty confusing for a first-time user. There are lots of screens, and the workflow is not obvious. There is no detailed help, but there are some tool tips attached to some (but not all) items. I was able to figure the app out, but it was not as intuitive as I would like.
The app supports iCloud, and if you have the app on both an iPad and an iPhone, you can edit or make other changes on either device. That's an excellent feature.
The résumés look quite good, but the designs vary mostly in color elements and not so much in the actual arrangement of text. Every template I saw included a place for a photo. Here in the US, at least, that is considered a résumé-writing no-no. Of course, you can opt to not include a photo. You can see some samples here.
Resume Designer Pro has nice-looking output, but I think the lack of .doc export will restrain many users. A similar app at a lower price, Resume Designer has similar user ratings, but also limits you to PDF output.
Resume Designer Pro requires iOS 6 or later, and it's optimized for the iPhone 5.
