Confused by resume formatting? You’re not alone! Here are some tips to get you started.
- Keep it simple. Busy resumes, with columns and call-out boxes and fancy bullet points, are more confusing than anything. The people reading your resume are likely to be pressed for time, so a straightforward format is best. It’s clean and clear and not confusing.
- Make sure your name is on top of each page, and make it look the same on all your documents. That ensures that your applications stays together, and is a nice visual touch.
- Add at least a piece of an address. It doesn’t have to be the whole mailing address (although it can be), but adding a city, state, and ZIP lets them determine if they might need to plan for your travel or for virtual interviews.
- Two pages is fine. I know you’ve heard you have to keep it to one, but especially if you have several years of experience, it’s hard to capture everything important on a single page. Make sure it says “page 2 of 2” under your name on the top of the second page.
- Don’t go beyond two pages, though. Unless you’re in medicine or academia or similar fields where CVs (curriculum vitae or just vitae) are common. Anything you cut can go onto your LinkedIn profile so it’s still captured somewhere.
- Use standard margins. If you start playing around with your margins, things look crowded and feel unpleasant to read.
- Stick to a couple fonts. Your name can be one, and the body of your document can be one. If you like the look of it, your headers can be the same font as your name, but don’t go crazy.
- Make sure your font sizes make sense. Your name should be the largest text on the document, and the body should be easy to read. Generally that means not smaller than a 10-point font, but I prefer 11 or 12.
- Add some color if you want. But don’t think a nice little stripe or a pretty border makes up for lack of content. On a resume, content is king.
- Avoid photos. They are not standard on US resumes, applicant tracking systems can’t read them, and some HR departments are trained to throw away any applications with photos so they aren’t discriminating based on how people look.
- Don’t use text boxes. They can be tempting because they group things together nicely, but they also quickly become problematic if you’re doing a big edit to the document or changing the order of things.
- Separate things clearly. Your headers can be in bold all caps, or bolded and underlined, or whatever makes sense. You’re aiming to break up the visual flow a little so it’s easy to read, but also to draw attention to the different sections, so it’s easy for the reader to skip to your education, for instance.
- Put your titles in bold, not the places. Jobs, volunteer experiences, degree names—these are the things that will catch the reviewer’s attention, not the employer or school.
- Use your space wisely. I like to have things like location and dates on a single line to balance the document and make sure there’s some text on the right.
- Use nice simple bullet points under your titles. Avoid paragraphs, as those look chunky and harder to read. You can have a couple styles of bullet points if you want, but again, don’t go crazy. Simpler is more elegant and easier.
