The content of your resume may play the strongest role in your ability to get the job, but the design of your resume plays a strong role in whether or not your resume gets a glance in the first place. Resumes that are designed on boring, terrible, or overused templates blend in with the crowd. The template and design that you use do effect how well your resume is received and how much of your content gets a look by the hiring manager.
Resume Design Tips and Strategies
- Clean is Better than Cluttered
One of the keys to a good resume design is that there is not much of a design at all. If you look right now at your Microsoft Word templates, you will see a variety of templates that have a lot of boxes and colors and lines, and you are expected to put your information within all of those boxes. These templates are too fancy. You want the focus to be only on your words. A simple, clean template is always a better decision.
- Fonts Should Be Professional
The best fonts are going to be sans serif professional fonts. Calibri and Ariel, for example, are easy to read fonts that do not look awkward or computerized. Times New Roman is “okay,” but it is not as clean as sans serif fonts. Comic Sans is a terrible, terrible choice.
- Use Bullets
It cannot be emphasized enough. Bullet points draw the eye far better than paragraphs. Paragraphs may be tempting, but bullet points are simply a better option and may also help you save space. Use bullet points.
- Look At the Impact of Your Layout
Bullet points are only the first step towards drawing the eye of the interviewer. You also need to make sure that your bullet points look clean. In other words, you have to make sure that the way you have written your bullet points still draws the eye of the interviewer. Look at the following two examples:
– This is a really short bullet point.
– This is a much longer bullet point that is arguably too long but if you really have something to say then it is okay.
– This is a really short bullet point.
Now compare that layout to this:
– This is a really short bullet point.
– This is a really short bullet point.
– This is a much longer bullet point that is arguably too long but if you really have something to say than it is okay.
Because you have moved the long sentence last, the bullet points look much, much cleaner. All of the bullets are together, without spacing, and the end of the long sentence does not cause the 3rd bullet point to blend in. The interviewer’s eye will go to all three bullet points.
- Look At Your Resume Like an Art Piece
Once you have completed your resume, print it out and look at it from far away. Does it look clean, professional and nice? Or does it look like everything is awkward? Stepping back and looking at your resume as though it was a design and not a resume is a good way to make sure that your resume will be well received by the interviewer. If your resume printed on two pages, where the second page was only the last part of the “skills” section, then as an art piece it would not look very strong would it?
Resume design may not be the most important part of your resume, but it certainly plays a role, and you need to take that role seriously.
Take Away Tips
- Pay attention to how you design your resume.
- Think clean, professional, and smooth.
