Resume Formatting Mistakes
You can find plenty of advice on what to include and what to leave off a resume. These tips can range from advice on how to leverage extracurricular activities and volunteer experience to land a job when changing careers to what mistakes can kill your prospects. Yet the little things can hurt you, too. Here are a few resume formatting mistakes that hurt your resume. We’ll also explain why these mistakes hurt your job hunt.
You Choose the Wrong Fonts
One variation of this mistake is choosing fonts that don’t translate well when submitted through websites or get read on someone else’s computer. A classic case is when the bullets on your list and special characters are turned into gibberish because the receiving device can’t read it. This will distract from your quality content. It can also hurt the search engine optimization of your resume. The additional, extraneous characters in the middle of your job description or accomplishments section prevent the text from ranking well in search results. How does this hurt you? When someone searches for the search term and the dash, quotation marks or bullet turn into gibberish, your resume may be missed in their database search. Or it will show up as a weaker match. Now the better matches are more likely to have their resumes read over yours.
Another variation of this mistake is choosing the wrong font size. The best font size for your resume is one that’s readable on all devices. The first implication of this is that you can’t use a smaller font size to cram everything onto one page. The second is that you shouldn’t use large fonts that may become unreadable on a small screen.
Choose fonts that are readable on all devices. Use a single font throughout the document so that it appears consistently and correctly no matter where it is read. To add emphasis to specific text, you should bold text instead of making it larger, though headings can be larger, bold or both.
You Ignore the Impact of Formatting
There are jokes that the last person to put two spaces after a period has died, ending that abominable practice. Yet we forget the reason we did that in the first place. Hint – it improved readability. Formatting follows consistent rules for that very reason. This is why you can’t ignore the impact of formatting on your resume. Technology has changed the rules, but it hasn’t eliminated the need for them.
One mistake people make is failing to insert “enters” or line breaks in their text. In the worst case scenario, the reader is confronted with a wall of text they don’t want to read. You’ll lose out to the person whose resume has clearly identified sections with white space between each so they can save time by skimming for the parts that interest them.
Extra indents or too much white space suggest you didn’t review the resume for readability. Or it comes across as a weird form of creativity. Unless you’re applying for a creative role, that’s a strike against you.
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