Resumes and Cover Letters

Example Resumes and Cover Letters — Write For Busy Strangers — Goals and Content of a Resume — Goals and Content of a Cover Letter

Example Resumes and Cover Letters

These are a bunch of my resumes and cover letters from the years since I started saving them. They’re mostly VFX-centric, but hopefully useful to everyone as reference. The main point here is much less about how to write a VFX resume and much that these don’t have to be fancy - they can simply be clear and detailed about the skills that make you such a great candidate and the unique skills you bring to the table.

Commented Resume and Cover Letter

I took one of my old resumes and cover letters and commented them up with why I wrote and structured them the way I did, called out a few things I wish I'd done differently, and noted a bunch of more general things.

view resume with comments in Google Docs
view cover letter with comments in Google Docs

Resume + Cover Letter Sets

I also dug up a bunch of sets of resumes and cover letters from old job applications (generally ones that led to at least an interview). Hopefully these are useful to see side-by-side.:)

view resume/cover letter sets from old job applications in Google Docs

​Write For Busy Strangers

So here's the lousy part - for pretty much any junior art or design opening, especially at a popular studio, recruiting is reviewing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications. For pretty much any role (not just art or design), dozens or hundreds of those will go to the hiring managers, who need to fit reviewing them in alongside all the things that easily fill a full-time job. If a studio is making an effort to respond to people quickly, we may be reviewing dozens or hundreds of applications - resume, cover letter, and portfolio - a day, often in addition to our day-to-day tasks.

So the easier your resume and cover letter are to read, and the faster they make it absolutely clear that you possess the skills required for this job, the more likely everyone will make it far enough to decide to call you and the happier everyone (including you:P) will be. If your resume isn't particularly clear or focused, it might even make it hard to tell whether you are in fact among the best-qualified for the job, and when people have limited bandwidth or tons of applicants to narrow down, that can be really bad for you.

To be clear, in reviewing hundreds of applications, across multiple roles, I don't think I've ever had resume formatting make or break an application or my opinion of any applicant (obligatory caveat that this could be very different for a graphic or UI designer - your resume might be best thought of as part of your portfolio). But I've definitely appreciated particularly clean and well-written resumes, and bemoaned a shockingly high number of resumes that were a pain to parse because someone decided this was the time to be clever with their fonts or formatting.

Another thing to consider: there’s a very good chance the people reading your resume know basically nothing about you, your projects or your work. Even if you know someone very well at the studio, the chances they’ve given your detailed skillset and work history to everyone is slim to none. Write for people who know about game development in general, but little to nothing about your projects and nothing about your unique contributions there. Get the basic facts of your responsibilities conveyed quickly, then flesh them out with the details, accomplishments, and constraints unique to the game and your contributions there.

​Overall Goals of a Resume

Simple is good. Yes, that means clear and concise, but it also just means you don't need to wild out on a fancy design or fonts or graphic designs for your resume (unless you're in UI or graphic design, then a resume is a fantastic place to flex). It doesn't need to be lovely, just easy to read - and ideally have a light background, because we're going to print it out to take notes on during your interview.

In my experience, everyone who interviews you will read the resume, but it's maybe a coin flip whether or not people will read your cover letter. So while cover letters can still be a very valuable tool, especially with recruiters who will be the first to review your application but rarely have domain expertise in your role, try to get all the essentials in your resume.

Guidelines

Tl;dr of a resume:

  • Keep it concise and easy to read.

  • Write about what made your work special or improved things, not just the bare facts of your role.

  • Organize details based on how relevant they are to this specific job.

  • Highlight soft skills too.

  • Use the language of the job description.

  • 1 page maximum (usually).

Okay but like, there’s a lot more detail we can add to that:

  • Keep it concise and easy to read. This means crystal-clear formatting, easy-to-read text, high contrast. It also means you don’t have to use complete paragraphs or even sentences if it gets the message across faster or clearer, or gives you more room to include more of your accomplishments. Why use many word when few word do trick?

  • Write about what made your work special or improved things, not just the bare facts of your role. For instance, if your last job was working as a VFX Artist, you might very well just write “Created VFX in Unreal,” I really hope you did that, and I want to read that you did that in approximately that many words, but I also want to read as many relevant, specific details as you can cram in there. Discuss the unique challenges, considerations, successes of each bullet point to give context and value to the basic facts of the job.

    So, you “Created VFX in Unreal.” What styles of VFX? What kind of gameplay considerations were you dealing with? What other tools or technical limitations were you working with? Were there any specific artistic or technical skills that you leaned on really heavily?

    • “Created stylized VFX in Unreal Niagara with a focus on clear, responsive gameplay feedback from both first- and third-person views”

    • “Worked closely with designers and audio to design and implement VFX that supported extremely fast-paced gameplay while maintaining strong animation and artistic principles”

    • “Created highly optimized VFX in a variety of styles and pipelines to run across a variety of platforms”

    • “Created and implemented highly stylized VFX using a combination of hand-animated flipbooks, meshes, and custom materials.”

    What about things that weren’t an obvious part of your job? Was there somewhere where you went above and beyond in, things you did that benefitted a much bigger part of the team than just yourself, some noteworthy challenge you rose to meet? I want to read about those too, very much!

    Some possible examples to get you reflecting on your own work:

    • Did you write a tool or a shader, made a new brushset for the team, anything that improved work for those around you?

    • Pick up some extra skills in order to be more efficient, flexible, or prevent bottlenecks?

    • Do research or create documentation that benefitted the rest of your team and reduced the pressure on tribal knowledge-holders?

  • Organize details based on how relevant they are to the specific job you're applying to. Work history and similar will generally be listed chronologically, but within the details of my work, in the skills section, etc. you can rearrange your details and pick and choose which ones to include to really focus your resume. For instance, I've had multiple jobs where I did both modeling and VFX, and I would swap, add, or remove those bullet points and the details of those bullet points around depending on the type of job I was applying to

  • Highlight soft skills too. Game development is an extremely small and collaborative industry, and the soft skills that make you a good teammate are incredibly valuable. Being a good communicator, collaborating well with others and being receptive and thoughtful about feedback, being a fast learner or a good teacher, and on and on, are all things that you should highlight as part of your work and accomplishments even if they were explicit job responsibilities. You could almost argue they’re more important to highlight, since they won’t show up in your portfolio.

  • Use the language of the job description. Does the job description mention Niagara? Use the word “Niagara” in your resume, not just “Unreal.” Are they a huge fans of animation principles? Include “animation principles” in your resume, and if there’s an appropriate place to do so, mention a few specifically that you utilize heavily in your work (love squash and stretch? big fan of exaggeration? have the portfolio to back that up? name-drop ‘em).

  • 1 page maximum (usually). Again, this goes back to being able to prune things down to the most relevant information and respect very busy people’s time. I've reviewed plenty of multi-page resumes that absolutely didn't need to be, and in a sea of dozens or hundreds of applications, it may mean the most important details get glossed over or missed altogether.

    An important caveat here: roles that rely less on a traditional portfolio, such as engineers, production, and design, will often rely much more on their resume and cover letter. So while it’s unlikely you’ll need more than a page at the beginning of your career even in these roles, that might change over time. The important part is to make sure you’re continuing to be concise, clear, and highlight your best work and skills… and then see if you still really need the extra page.

Content

  • Your basic information: name, role, portfolio, and contact information

  • ​Your most relevant skills to the job you're applying for, along with applicable software and languages

  • Your most relevant work and education experience, which should back up and expand upon the skill section. Depending on how much of each of these you have, it may or may not be broken up into sections: common sections at the junior level include “Work History” for professional work and contracts, “Projects” for school projects, game jams, etc., or “Education” for school, classes, mentorships, etc., but if you have only a few of these all of these could also be consolidated into “Related Experience”

  • Extra and optional things:

    • Objective: an objective is typically a one-sentence version of a cover letter - an opportunity to introduce yourself a little more personably before you transform into a pile of work history and to customize this resume to the place you’re applying to. However, an objective isn’t necessary for a game dev application, so if you can’t come up with a one-sentence you feel good about or you want the space for other content, you can ditch it.

    • Awards, tangentially-related work, etc.: if you have anything like these, they’re often great to include. If you don’t, no big deal. If you do include them, make sure to include at least a line or two giving context to the award/work/etc. and why it’s cool; however if you want and are able you can flesh these out to include as much detail as a typical Work History entry.

    • Non-industry work experience: if you’re really light on industry experience and are worried your resume feels empty, you can include non-industry work as well. If you do so, try to highlight the skills that are still useful in game dev - a retail or waiting job may still very well require you to be organized, a good communicator, proactive or creative about fixing problems, and so on.

​Overall Goals of a Cover Letter

I'm really bad at cover letters, I'm sorry. I'm sure there's lots of good advice out there - all I can really confidently say is to be nice, be sincerely excited, and use it to expand upon and support your resume (and vice versa). Cover letters are where I tend to do the most tailoring to the specific job, since the goal of a resume is to be concise and extremely readable, and customizing a portfolio takes a ton of time. So this is where I'll cite my appreciation for the game and/or studio, indicate any research/experience I've done into them specifically, and stitch together all those bullet points from my resume into a more a cohesive story of why I'm well-suited to their job in particular.

Cover letters are also where you can give people a bit more of an idea of who you are as a person. Unlike your resume, you’re writing in longform, and you can use this to show off more of your personality, passions, . In the name of efficiency, still keep it relevant to the job, but this can be the place where people start getting the first glimpse of what kind of teammate you might be to spend 40 hours a week with.

Also, these don't have to be long. Common industry advice is typically 2-3 paragraphs - the example on this page is the longest cover letter I've ever written, largely because I was a) jumping career tracks (from art to outsource management) and b) it wasn't an art creation role, so I couldn't lean as much on my portfolio to do the talking for me. If you look at my other cover letters in the downloads at the top of the page you'll see they're a fair bit shorter.

Finally, as with resumes, cover letters will likely be longer for things like design, engineering, and production where you’re more reliant on your words selling yourself rather than a portfolio. You still don’t want more than a page, but utilizing that entire page is probably more important.

Guidelines

  • Get to the main reasons you're well-suited to the role asap (not that different from a resume). For a longer cover letter (i.e. design, engineering, production, if you don't have a ton of experience in the role you're applying to), stitch the details of your work/resume into a short, readable story of why you're a good fit for the position.

  • Communicate anything you can't easily do in the resume - for instance explicitly stating why you like the game, team, or studio and showing that you've done your research (where possible), or aforementioned more personal stories (I say stories relative to a resume - so normally like, a few complete sentences).

  • Customize it to the job!! No matter how much you've customized your resume to a role, it's very hard to make them feel genuinely tailor-made to a single application - the format just doesn't really support it. Use the cover letter to balance that out. Doesn't mean you have to write it from scratch each time, by a long shot, but a form cover letter is even more obvious than a form resume, so make sure you're doing what you can.

  • Your resume and cover letter should support each other. Use them both to emphasize your most important qualifications repeatedly and from different angles, and to cover the things that the other can't (i.e. cover letter is good for introducing more human personality and story, resume is good for communicating facts quickly).

  • Again, it really doesn't have to be long. The people reviewing it are still super busy and 2-3 paragraphs is usually plenty, especially for artists.

Content

  • Greeting: Cover letter greetings are surprisingly contentious and opinions go in and out of style - do you research the specific person it’s going to and address them by name? Assume nothing and simply be politely ambiguous? Try for novelty or a joke?

    I’m generally not a huge fan of addressing it to a single person, because, well, even in the best case scenario a lot of people will read it (and in the worst case, your research turned up the wrong name). A joke can easily be, well, really bad, which may be really off-putting or incredibly endearing depending on the specific personalities reading it.

    Simple, positive, and broadly-addressed is by far the safest, and it’s unlikely anyone will fault you for writing “To the Moonshot team.” (And if we do, we’re butts.) However, since I don’t follow my own advice, I like to try for a little bit of charm and a slightly more tailored greeting just to emphasize out the gate that this application is for them, specifically. So I might change “the Overwatch team,” to “Scientists, adventurers, and oddities,” or greet the Hearthstone team as “Taverngoers.” It probably makes no difference either way, but it’s fun.

  • Introduction: Much like your resume, you want to get your name and role out there as quickly as possible, along with the specific position you’re applying for. From there the order you hit the rest of these in is kind of up to you - I’ve listed them in the order I like to use because it focuses on why I’m good for the job first.

  • Relevant experience and skills: Use part of your cover letter to summarize and tee up the best parts of your resume. It doesn’t have to be one solid paragraph of longform resume if you want to intersperse it throughout, that part’s up to you, but you do want the two to reinforce and add to each other. If you’ve been learning any new skills lately, this is also an easier place to talk about them than your resume.

  • Passion, research, etc.: Make the cover letter about how excited you are about this application in particular! Talk about things you enjoy or respect about the team, the studio, the game(s), the way they approach the discipline you’re applying to. Talk about your love of games, your job, development in general. Sneak in a few of those little details that show you’ve done your homework and are taking this seriously.

  • Any other details you want to include: I go pretty lean and impersonal on my cover letters, which isn’t everyone’s style - cover letters are, after all, a great place to start showing your personality. If there’s more of your story that you want to tell sooner rather than later, or a journey to your current career path that you want to make sure they know, the cover letter is the place to do it.

  • Sign-off and basic information: Be polite, reiterate your availability and best ways to contact, repeat your name, portfolio, and contact information. Yes, those’re all already on your resume. They go on every single file you submit so that you’re always easy to get ahold of.