Creative Director Resume Example

How to craft a great Creative Director Resume, or have Leet Resumes write your resume for free.

author-img
Written by Marc Cenedella
Leading expert on resumes
marc-photo

Marc Cenedella

Marc Cenedella is a nationally recognized thought leader on careers, resume writing, job search, career management and recruiting, Marc is frequently sought out by national media organizations for his expert commentary on employment, resumes, the job search and the job market.

Bg Example image
Last updated on May 2, 2021
Please Write My Resume

Leet Resumes Writes Great Professional Resumes For Free

Border Resume Example

Tips Appreciated

Please Write My Resume

How to Write a Great Creative Director Resume

It’s no easy task to perfectly balance the creative and logical realms of an organization, but as Creative Director, you excel in that space.

Your ability to communicate with creatives, executives and clients alike makes you a powerful influencer in any organization you’re a part of. Now it’s time to write a Creative Director resume that reflects the many skills and talents that make you the best at what you do.

If you’re stumped and wondering, “What would Don Draper do?” we’ve created a step by step guide to write a powerful resume that gets you more interviews and job offers.

And if you’re thinking it would just be easier for someone else to write your resume, Leet Resumes does just that – and they do it for free (tips are appreciated).

A Resume Template for a Creative Director

You know how important the structure of an advertisement is. That’s why we made a resume template to follow.

There’s a tried-and-true method to writing your resume that eliminates any extra guessing, and activates your audience by giving them what they’re looking for.

Your Creative Director resume will include the following:

  • Name + Contact
  • Professional Headline
  • Summary
  • Work Experience
  • Education
  • Key Words

That’s the formula. Six simple and straightforward sections. No FORCEPS or UPWORDS here.

If you organize your resume into these six sections, you’ll get more callbacks for interviews and more job offers which will help you land a Creative Director role that feeds both your creative and analytical strengths.

Name + Contact

Top and center is your name.

Plain and simple. Don’t try to be creative here – there’s better use for that later.

Put your name in a professional and legible font and make it slightly larger than the rest of your text.

Remember, this is an advertisement for you. Establish your brand identity so the reader knows who to call.

Directly under your name you’ll include your contact information. Just email and phone numbers are required these days. If you want to include something more like your LinkedIn profile, be sure it’s one of your main methods of communication that you check every day, otherwise keep the CTA straightforward.

As you know, the more options you give to the reader, the more you dilute their likelihood of taking action. So keep it as simple as possible and just give them the information that’s needed to get called back for an interview.

Professional Headline

Next, we move on to the official hook: your professional headline.

You’re used to copywriters pitching you one-liners and choosing which ones will resonate with your client. Here’s a great place to apply that Creative Director expertise and write a catchy tagline of your own.

In 3-5 words, summarize your career in a way that will grab the recruiter’s attention and make your resume stand out from the others. You want to give an accurate description of yourself that makes your future employer think you are the perfect person to lead their creative.

The best way to do this is to start with an eye-catching and positive adjective to describe yourself as Creative Director: strategic, goal-oriented, high-performing, resourceful, collaborative…fill in the blank with whichever adjective describes you best.

After you’ve chosen an adjective, add your current role with a nod to your experience like: junior, senior, executive.

This headline is just the memorable elevator pitch for the recruiter to easily recall. The rest of your resume will fill in the details. (Or, you can have Leet Resumes fill in the details for you.)

Professional Summary

Next is your professional summary. It should start with something like this: job titles you’re targeting + the Creative Director skills you possess + any notable achievements or awards you’ve received for your creative work.

For example: Senior Creative Director with Two Effie Award Nominations…

From there, the next two to four lines of your professional summary sell your audience on what you value as a CD and the capabilities and talents you’ll bring to help lead their organization to creative success.

Because your role lives between the creative and executive departments, you want to include both the hard skills and soft skills that emphasize your value.

Show them your interpersonal skills to paint a picture of how you’ll oversee the creative department while keeping executive objectives in mind: communication, management skills, client relationships, and leadership.

It’s also important to include the hard skills you possess to deliver creative work that’s both superior to the competition and consistent in delivery: organization, analytical problem solving, brand strategy, and project management.

These 2-4 lines are the place to give an overview of your skills, promotions, and career highlights. But remember, this summary is still a summary.

Keep it concise and make it sizzle. You’ll have plenty of space in the next section to be specific.

Work Experience

You’ve drawn them in with your tagline and summary. Now it’s time to do what all great advertising does: tell the story. Contrary to popular belief, this is not the place to list the boring duties and responsibilities of each position. This is an advertisement, not a product manual.

Instead, tell the story of how you improved each organization with your skills and talents. Show the recruiter your results.

To do this, you’re going to focus on numbers, success verbs, and your stunning record of accomplishments. Tell the story of the brand redesign that finally brought Gen Z on board. Or the quirky creative that went viral with a shoestring budget.

Start the narrative by listing your work experience in reverse chronological order.

Be accurate with both your job titles and your dates (no estimations or exaggerations here).

Next, steer clear of the paragraphs and list your successes, achievements and accomplishments for each job listed in bullet point form.

There are two very important details to include in these bullet points:

Start each point with a strong success verb.

Throw out the weak overused resume verbs like improved, made, assisted, oversaw, and so on. These verbs don’t give the full picture of your success.

Instead, use strong success and action verbs that show off what you bring to the table and how the next company will benefit from hiring you.

These success verbs include: grew, optimized, exceeded, delivered, accelerated, boosted, and the like.

When you read these bullet points back to yourself, they should all feel and sound exciting. Otherwise, jump back into the thesaurus and keep fine-tuning your verbs until your resume is an unmissable stand-out next to the competition.

Include as many numbers as possible.

Numbers make your success concrete. They paint a clear picture of what you’ve accomplished by using measurable data.

Conversion, traffic, creative budgets, and sales metrics are easy to find and include, but as Creative Director, you might be wondering what numbers can be included to show your management successes, client portfolio, or campaign creation.

How many creative professionals were in the team you managed? How many different client campaigns did you simultaneously guide to success and growth? How long did your ad campaign run after your clients continually extended it because of its lasting success?

When you think you’ve included all the numbers that you possibly can, take another look and add even more.

Finally, make sure you show every promotion in each job position. This shows how successful you’ve been within an organization, and shows the recruiter that you can make their company successful, too.

Education

Education is a necessary section, but not the most important.

Factually display where you went to school, the specific dates, and your completed degree(s).

If you have any notable awards or honors, those can be included here, too.

Any incomplete degrees, or highlights of your educational career that aren’t official awards or honors aren’t necessary to include. You want to keep the focus on what you do as a Creative Director, and your college clubs probably aren’t relevant to that.

Keywords and Skills for Your Creative Director Resume

The final section of your resume is the keywords. This is the place to include all your targeted keywords for the position you’re applying for.

Just as you conduct market research to know what resonates with customers, use the job posting to find the exact skills they’re looking for in the listed job position, and use that knowledge to include all of your relevant skills and expertise.

This section is meant to be scannable, so don’t stuff it with skills that are irrelevant to this position. We all know that Creative Directors have hundreds of skills across many different mediums, but all that matters here is which skills will have the most impact for this job.

Include skills and keywords in regards to:

  • Interpersonal Skills: team management, leadership, training, collaboration, communication, public speaking
  • Organizational Skills: project management, budget management, time management, attention to detail, content calendars, and ability to meet deadlines
  • Strategic Skills: critical thinking, analytical problem solving, brand strategy, market research
  • Creative Skills: creative media assets, content, creative development
  • Relevant Technologies: Adobe suite, social media platforms, marketing platforms

Once you have a curated list of keywords that highlight your relevant and diverse expertise as a Creative Director, your resume is complete! Congratulations!

Can someone else write my resume instead?

Still not sure about writing your own resume?

That’s quite alright. Have Leet Resumes write a personalized Creative Director resume for you, free of charge (though tips are much appreciated).

It really is that simple.

creativedesign

Similar Resumes We Can Write For You Right Now

Great professional resumes for great professionals.

Users Love Us

Leet Resumes really helped me clearly explain my skills and strengths in a marketable way. They were fa-solidt and responsive, and the entire process was very smooth. Will recommend to friends.
My Leet resume is more focused than my previous one. It highlights my accomplishments without all the fluff. I found the process easy and really helpful. Thanks again!
Wow, thank you for your time and effort on this, it looks great! I wasn’t expecting so much work to be put into the transformation, so I appreciate the wonderful surprise.

Ready To Get Started?

Leet Resumes writes great professional resumes for free.
Please Fill out all fields
or
ready-to-get-started