Super Mario Applies for a Job

Robby Leonardi built his CV as a Super Mario World level. You scroll through it like a side-scroller: the player character jumps over obstacles, collects items, moves through worlds labeled with his actual skills—animation, UI design, front-end development. His stats are displayed as game meters. His work history unfolds as you progress through stages. It runs in HTML5 and it’s immaculate.

What makes it work is that the form and the content are the same thing. The interactive resume doesn’t just claim he can design and code—it demonstrates both, simultaneously, in the act of being viewed. You watch someone navigate through it and the conclusion arrives before you’ve consciously reached it: yes, obviously, hire this person.

At the time he was working at Fox News, which explains why he was looking for something else. The best designers often end up in places that need them desperately and understand them not at all. There’s something quietly funny about someone who thinks in Super Mario spending his days inside the Fox News visual machine.

The standard resume is a document designed by HR departments to make every applicant look identical—a flat surface, easy to scan and discard. Leonardi’s version doesn’t fight that convention. It ignores it completely, which is the only move that actually works.