📇 UX Career Tip #4: Name your files thoughtfully

How would they find your resume in a pile with hundred of files?

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

⛔️ Don’t do: "Resume.pdf"

✅ Do: "Kirill_Vechtomov_Lead_UX_Designer_Resume_20221021.pdf" (or something along these lines).

A universal advice is to try and imagine yourself in the shoes of you target audience and think through their point of view. (Do you want to be a UX designer or what? 😉)

Let's take recruiter, for instance.

In most cases, they are hiring for multiple different roles on an ongoing basis. They are flooded with hundreds of applications per week. Hundreds of resumes, cover letters, portfolios.

How can they make sense of all the randomly-named files? There is no single naming convention all the applicants use (if at all).

So, the least you can do to make their job easier is to include some key metadata of your document into the file name:

• Your full name

• Job you are applying for

• Document type (e.g. resume, cover letter, writing exercise, etc.)

• Date

Going deeper, the order is also important to think about from the IA point of view. Probably, Job_Name_DocumentType_Date would be preferred, as it will make it easier to sort and group files by the job, which is the most likely primary "object" for recruiters.