Resume Readability

The most important aspect of constructing your resume is to make it “readable”!

Resume experts stress that you have to grab the reader of your resume in the first 10- 15 seconds or it ends up in the reject pile. Crowded, dense resumes with small fancy fonts are difficult to read. You can have the most wonderful resume in the world but if it is not readable, no one will know! Following just a few guidelines can help your resume to be readable and consequently, work as a successful marketing tool for your career search.

First, white space is your friend! Margins and adequate spacing throughout the resume is critical. While it is recommended that you use 1” margins all around, if necessary, the margins can be reduced to .8”; however, anything smaller than that can make your resume appear crowded and more difficult to read. In addition, using spacing between sections and other areas of your resume is very important as well. White space is more effective between lines of text – so if you are listing items such as technical skills, instead of listing each item on a single line and leaving a large white space at the right, make 2 or 3 columns. You might consider using the “table option” to line up the items neatly using bullets, then remove or “hide” the grid lines.

It is critical that you write in complete sentences in a cover letter, however, this is not true with your resume. It’s a good thing too, as you need to ration the words you use in order to have it be impactful in the space you have. Write in sentence fragments to get your point across. This not only saves space but it is the acceptable style for resumes today. So you maybe hearing for the first time in your life that it is okay that you to write incomplete sentences.

You were probably told to keep your resume to one or two pages. That does not mean you take your four page resume and reduce the font size so that the reader needs an electron microscope to read it! A font size of 11 and using an easy –to-read font (i.e. times roman) will help the reader to scan your resume. Using a smaller font will require using more white space to keep it readable.

Use bolding, bullets, caps, and underlining to enhance readability and appearance. Try not to have large blocks of text. Ideally there should not be more than 5 or 6 lines of text without using a bullet, a space or some other way to break it up. After about 5 lines or so, the human eye tends to jump to the next part on the resume and important information can be overlooked.

However, like everything else in life, too much of a good thing can backfire on you when it comes to resumes. Let’s take bullets. Some individuals think that each line should have a bullet. This is what I call the machine gun approach: Bullet…Bullet…Bullet…Bullet. It is just too many bullets! So don’t overuse your bullets or other features.

Another aspect impacting readability is using right/left “box” formatting. While the resume looks very neat upon first glance, this method causes irregular spaces between the words to create that nice clean right hand margin. Unfortunately, it can negatively impact the readability of your resume. The reader may not recognize what it is, but will feel that something is not “quite right” and if you have only 15 seconds to get the reader’s attention, this can have a big impact!

In summary, remember the most critical, yet often overlooked aspect of writing a resume: make it READABLE.

Guest Expert:

Elizabeth Johnson combines over 25 years of expertise in the Human Resources and Career Management industries.

Most recently, Elizabeth partnered with CareerBeam to provide MBA career coaching for the RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Prior to this she served as senior career management advisor at the Kogod School of Business, at American University.

Her previous roles also include Vice President and Director of Human Resources for Volunteers of America; Focus Technologies; Concert, a British Telecom/AT&T;/MCI joint venture; and various HR roles at British Aerospace.Elizabeth has served as a management consultant for Lee Hecht Harrison, The Millennium Group, and The Personnel Office. Her broad business experience spans multiple industries including Biotechnology, Telecommunications, and Nonprofit, Engineering, Real Estate, Healthcare and Government contracting.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and possesses Masters’ degrees in counseling and human resources related disciplines from Loyola University and American University.

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