Preparing your Resume: Formatting
How to use Formatting to your advantage
The main instrument that you will use to get a job is your Resume. Unfortunately, many people don’t give this vital document that care it needs to show them to their best advantage as regards their skills and experience.
So, just what is a Resume?
Basically, it tells your experience – work, education and skills as well as any life experience that would be relevant to your career.
This is a two-part article, looking at your resume section by section, what to include, what to leave out, and the best way to format it (and why). The sections have been set out in the order that I would recommend that they be included in your resume.
This first article deals with formatting your resume.
Formatting
Unless you are going for a position that involves highly creative graphics, desktop publishing, etc., then leave out the fancy formatting in your Resume.
Your resume needs to be able to be sent and downloaded quickly, and be read easily on a computer screen. It needs to be copied and pasted where necessary.
Fancy formatting, fancy fonts and certain types of document don’t allow that.
For ease of readability, use straight Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma or Verdana fonts – either 10 or 11 pitch. Remember: not everybody has those fancy fonts that you have on your machine, and some of them are very difficult to read on a computer screen.
Leave out text boxes, shaded sections, section and page borders and pictures of any sort (only include a photo of yourself where it specifically asks for it in the advertisement). These make the file size bigger, and slower to transmit.
You should save your Resume in either Word (.doc) or Rich Text (.rtf) format, as these are generally the industry standards used.
You may ask why not a PDF? And what was that about copy and pasting?
If you are sending an application to Recruitment Company, then they will not send your Resume as it is to their client. Instead, they copy and paste the body of your resume (leaving out your contact details and referees) to their client – usually as part of their own document.
A PDF needs to be converted back (which is not always successful) or re-typed and many more advanced forms of formatting (for example: text boxes, nested tables, cascading style sheets) do not readily allow themselves to be cut and pasted with ease.
Limit yourself to using Tabs, bulleted and numbered lists, bold and italic in your documents. Beware of too much italic, though, it can be difficult to read.
Make sure that you leave sufficient space between your sections so that they are easily defined. Your reader should be able to easily run their eye down your Resume and not get confused as to the beginning and ending of sections.
Finally – and most importantly: spell and grammar check your resume.
As a Recruiter, I look at many Resumes each day, and a poorly spelled and grammatically incorrect Resume often gets put at the bottom of the list. Why? Because it’s an indication of the attention to detail that you have. A person who doesn’t take the time to read through their Resume, or even to use the spell and grammar checker on it, shows that they have a poor attention to detail.
Let’s face it: if you can’t be bothered to check your own Resume, what will you be like with articles in your work that rely on your checking them thoroughly?
Now: do yourself a favour. Go now and spell and grammar check your Resume. You may be surprised at just what you find there.
