Resume Donkey

Resume Writing Tips – Part 2

Posted on 06. Dec, 2008 by Morgan in Job Hunting News, Resume Formatting, Resume Tips, Resume Writing

In Part 1 of resume writing tips, we talked about getting the basics right and focused primarily on spelling issues.  I want to make sure we hit this again, because spelling errors can be hard stops for human resources professionals and recruiters looking for the right candidate for a job.  While we’ll get in to more advanced resume writing tips in future posts we’re sticking to the basics because these are the table stakes for even getting in to the interview game.  If you can’t ante up with the basics don’t even waste your time with the more advanced ideas for getting the job.

The basic resume tips include:

• Spelling
• Formatting
• Readability
• Contact information

So in quick summary from Resume Writing Tips Part 1 – Spelling:

Spelling
This shouldn’t have to be said, but lamentably, it does. Spelling can kill and it’s up to you to make sure you’re bullet proof in the spelling department. Avoid the dreaded spelling error trap by following these quick Resume Tips:

1. Read backwards. When you proof your resume read from the bottom to the top and from right-to-left (in reverse of your natural reading pattern). This keeps you focused on each word and doesn’t allow your brain to fill in or fix errors in your spelling. You’ll catch many more errors using this method.
2. Get a friend to review your resume. Preferably a good-writing friend. A copywriter, English major, or PR professional can give your resume the close read it deserves. With a fresh eye they’ll catch anything you’re glossing over. Resume Donkey guarantees the spelling on your resume is perfect or your money back – guaranteed.

So now let’s talk about how to best format your resume.

Formatting Your Resume

Formatting your resume is an important aspect of getting your resume noticed, either for better or worse, how you format your resume will make a big impact on whether you make it to the short list for consideration for the job.

Why?  Well there’s a couple of factors but it basically comes down to the human resources professional or recruiter, faced with a huge stack of resumes and only so much time in the day, who is scanning your resume.  They’re looking for keywords, titles, and trying to glean a quick sense of who you are in just the brief time that they spend reading your resume.  Because of this fact formatting must be done in such a way that let’s the HR professional review your resume quickly (they’re doing that already) but also effectively.  We want them to see what we want them to see.

We’ll talk more about this in making your resume readable, but here are six resume tips on how to improve the formatting of your resume to make it easier for HR professionals to read and understand what you’re trying to tell them with it.

• Don’t use fancy fonts, like Comic Sans, Script or other abnormal fonts that aren’t part of the Arial, Times New Roman, Courier families (and their Mac equivalents).  Unless you’re a creative person these fonts can make your resume look unprofessional and can get you in to the reject pile quickly.
• Don’t use color fonts.  Use black type on a background that makes your words legible.  Blue, red, orange are all big no-no’s on resumes.
• Stick with a minimum 10-point type.  We don’t want the HR person or recruiter to have to squint to read your resume or to make it difficult to read in any way.
• If you’ve got less than 7-years experience your resume belongs on one-page.  No exceptions.  We’re going for a high signal-to-noise ratio on a resume.  One page is plenty for under 7-years experience. Period.
• Use bold, italic and underline sparingly.  Bolding, italicizing and underlining font is done for one reason only – to make it stand out.  If everything has some type of formatting on it nothing stands out in your resume.  Use it sparingly and to highlight key parts of your resume like titles, dates and occasionally a very strong aspect of your resume.
• Do not write big paragraphs describing your positions.  Resumes are read like newspapers or web pages – headlines are scanned, the first sentence leads to the next, and so on.  Make your information easy to comprehend when the HR pro is scanning your resume.

We’ll talk more about resume formatting in our resume readability post next, but keep these in mind when putting together your resume.

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