I do not do general resume “proofreading” or “quick checks” of any kind. If you have worked with me on a resume, you know this. Any less-than-one-hour “review” of a resume that has otherwise been untouched by a professional is disingenuous. I cannot make your resume stand out from others with a quick proofread, and nobody else can either.
Here is my philosophy with resumes: I can make you a resume or teach you how to make a resume that will get you that job you want or that raise you are seeking. If you give me a job posting, I can get you an interview or teach you how to get the interview as long as you have about 75% or more of the qualifications the job posting requests. But it will require hours of work choosing precise language and picking what to highlight for that specific job posting.
If you do not want to put in that work and just want a “quick check,” I cannot guarantee anything. Your resume will appear average, and your odds of getting an interview are unknown. A quick proofread of a resume adds no value. You can find the one typo in your resume yourself. You do not need a professional.
If you want to DIY your resume rather than paying the large bill for someone like me to improve it but actually want to make it great, this article is for you. The first step of this is to describe your experience using the right verbs, quantifiable achievements, and ATS keywords for your profession. I describe how to do this here, and it is the most essential part of creating a great resume! This is a necessary first step.
But some folks still ask about the format and look of a resume beyond describing their experience. I want to highlight that getting through your employer’s Applicant Tracking Software (by using ATS keywords!) is more important than format these days since most employers use that initial screening. However, your resume may land in front of a real person after meeting ATS requirements, and format can make a difference at that stage. To address the questions I often receive about general formatting, here are some tips on making your resume look good when it hits a potential employer’s computer screen or desk.
General Format and Look
Your resume should be legible, meaning the font size should not be below a size 10. Clearly state your name prominently, and include any required field-specific information up top (for example, your clearance level) so your potential employer does not have to look for it. I have added my blurred out resume, and you can see that my name is obvious, even when the picture is too blurry to read anything else:
The blurry resume makes it easier to focus on format rather than content to easily see general patterns. (You do not want to read my resume anyway!) First, your resume should not have a ton of extra room on it, often called “white space.” You can see that I prefer to move the dates to the left hand margin so they do not take up space on the main resume that can be used for valuable content about experiences and achievements. By moving the dates to the side, the only white space on the resume is in the margin.
While a great resume limits white space, the space you do have throughout a resume should improve its legibility. On my blurry resume, you can see that there is a bit of extra space between different jobs. What you cannot see from the blurry version, is the first page of experience describes experience pertaining to the precise field in which I work while the second page outlines earlier roles that are less directly related to my current work. You cannot always have that easy separation, but if you can, it is helpful for potential employers to see the most pertinent accomplishments up front.
Next, you can see that, in general, the most recent job has the longest accomplishment list. Each job after gets shorter. Since your most recent experience should be your most advanced area of expertise, this highlights this experience. As you design your own resume, think about this guideline to include the most information about more recent roles.
However, I do have one aberration on my resume: In the middle of page two, I have a job with a few more points than the three preceding it on the second page. This job is in an adjacent field to my current field, so it warrants emphasis in my industry. Most resume “rules” have situations in which they should be broken, and this is one worth noting. In general, your most recent job should have the longest accomplishment list, and each older job accomplishment list should get shorter or stay the same. The exception to this guideline is if you have an older job with relevant accomplishments to the position to which you are applying. Particularly if it is a job where you can work in a number of ATS keywords, be thorough despite the job’s location farther down on your resume.
Getting Specific: Individual Job Format
Most other resume resources will give you similar guidance about making your resume legible, limiting white space, clearly defining each job, and generally including more information about more recent experiences. Now onto the good stuff that I learned while working at a prestigious Washington, DC think tank that did not necessarily align with my beliefs but was great for personal learning. (Yes, you can learn from people with differing opinions—I recommend everyone try it sometime!) This is where resume formatting gets picky.
For the record, I use a pretty traditional format without a panel on the side to highlight skills, a purpose or summary section up top, or those newer elements. However, even if you choose to use one of those formats, these formatting guidelines still make your resume look much more professional when used within the parameters of your chosen format. (Despite my use of a traditional resume format rather than the latest design, I get paid well by a management consulting firm that calls its employees “innovators,” so the traditional format seems to work just fine.)
Below is a blurry picture of one job from my resume. I chose it because it worked out to be a prettier one to emphasize my formatting points, and I recognize that not every accomplishment list will work out so perfectly. The top two lines of each job outline the following information before I get into my list of accomplishments:
Employer Name, City, State (add country if different than the job to which you are applying)
Job Title, Team Name if relevant
So for my teaching experience, that looks like this:
Teach For America, Las Vegas, NV
Secondary Mathematics Instructor at Sunrise Mountain HS, Clark County School District
After those initial two lines, no text is bolded, underlined, italicized, or anything else for any given job. Again, this draws attention to where a new experience begins to easily guide the reader’s eye to the important aspects of your resume.
The remaining lines in the blurry photo are the bulleted accomplishments for that job. That picky but prestigious think tank advised me that organizing a job’s list of accomplishments so the first line is longest and each line after keeps getting shorter makes a resume more aesthetically pleasing. Check this out in my resume below:
See how the lines gradually get shorter until the last line is the shortest? This gives your resume an aesthetically pleasing swooping effect that makes it look sharp. On the note of line length, that top line of each job description should get as close as possible to the far right side of the page. This reduces white space throughout the resume. All of your lines should be relatively close to the edge of the page, but each line gets a little less close to it.
If you look at my resume, you will see this is not perfect throughout, but it is close enough that that gentle swooping quality makes the resume easy to follow from experience to experience. This quality makes your resume noticeably more organized than resumes with choppy lines of different lengths throughout the page.
Does this seem difficult because you already know you should be tailoring your resume to each individual job, ideally drawing from a base resume to select different accomplishments for particular jobs? Yes. Again, this process is not one for sending out 100 resumes. I do not believe in sending out 100 resumes. I believe in sending out at most five and landing the job quickly. Being this particular about the look of your resume is how you do that.
Showing a Promotion on Your Resume
That job format works well enough if you have always job hopped for career advancement, but showing a promotion with different responsibilities and achievements is a bit different. The first and second jobs listed on the second page of my resume show this sequence:
Since this is blurry, here is an example of how I show a promotion:
Employer Name, City, State (add country if different than the job to which you are applying)
Job Title of Most Recent Position, Team Name if relevant
Achievements relevant to most recent position
Job Title of Previous Position, Team Name if relevant
Achievements relevant to previous position
You only need to write the company name once, to signify advancement within that company. However, separating your achievements into two separate positions allows you to show more diverse responsibilities while emphasizing your ability to grow and learn with a particular employer.
Each individual position’s block should still have the swooshing aesthetic, with the first line being the longest and subsequent lines becoming shorter. The only difference from other jobs is the omission of the company name preceding the job title line.
Order and Inclusion: What Goes Where?
You probably noticed that I, a resume expert and mid-career professional, still have my education listed first on my resume. You may also have heard that the second you get a valuable professional experience your education should be moved to the bottom of your resume.
I am here to tell you that worrying about the order of certain aspects of your resume in detail is not worth your time. Here is one thing I consider as a person with a two-page resume (actually three, but page three is only for publications since published works allow you to break the rules): Someone reading my resume realistically may only look at page one before they decide who gets an interview. What do I want them to know about me if they only glance at that first page?
Personally, I want them to know I have multiple experiences in my niche field, all of which involved dealing with large amounts of money and nuanced policy. I also want them to know I have a field-relevant master’s degree plus a master’s in teaching. This tells a potential employer that I have the background knowledge to contextualize problems that arise in my field of expertise, and I can teach others how to do the same. I put my education first to quickly convey this information to the person who gives my resume only five seconds of their time.
Your own decisions regarding employment-or-education first depend on what message you want to send to a prospective employer. Neither decision is incorrect. You are just prioritizing different information to someone that glances at a resume.
The order of resume information generally stresses applicants, so here is what I use:
Education (degrees)
Relevant Employment History
Skills (technology, language)
Activities (This is where I mention my many rugby jobs and Phippen Tax & Financial Services)
That is it! Again, I use a fairly traditional resume format without frills. I do not include an opening purpose statement or summary. The information I put first provides the summary I want.
I also do not provide a section for soft skills. The importance of soft skills is finally being recognized, and I have noticed a number of articles suggesting their inclusion on a resume. Here is my take: Soft skills are important and make the difference in whether a potential employee should get the job. I would still never list out soft skills on my resume. Instead, my soft skills should come across in the descriptions of employment accomplishments and experiences. Telling a potential employer I have leadership skills is pointless. On the other hand, saying I “Led a team of five professionals to complete an analysis of production over a one-year period to develop a plan for the following year that raised production rates by 25%” convinces a potential employer that I am a leader. (No, I did not do that, and I just made up that accomplishment—this is why people pay me to write their resumes.)
While I do not include soft skills, hard skills are important to list, particularly if the job description requests them. While it is even better to work hard skills into accomplishments, you should still list them clearly for the person that specifically checks off the presence of hard skills. Hard skills generally include technology and language skills, but they may also include field-specific skills. Including field-specific skills is a great way to easily include ATS keywords in a clear way.
Including an “Activities” section is not something everyone encourages, but I find it important to include some personality in a resume. Show your potential employer what is important to you in your life. If for no other reason, it is a terrific opener to the leave you will eventually take or the fact that you go to the gym at lunch everyday. This section also just makes you memorable. I am sure when potential employers are debating between one other candidate and me, I am called “the rugby player,” and that is just fine with me. “The rugby player” is a lot better than “the one with those green socks” or “the candidate who spoke weirdly.” Give yourself a unique identifier rather than letting potential employers do it for themselves.
One or Two Pages
At some point in your career you will make the jump from one to two pages. When you are in the one-and-a-half page phase of life it is difficult to determine whether to condense to one or go for two. Here are two pointers to decide:
If your base resume is shorter than three pages, stick to a one-pager. You do not need two pages of a perfect resume until you have at least three full pages of accomplishments on your base resume.
It is time to adopt a two-page resume when it is difficult to fit the information on two pages. If it is easy, stick to one.
Keep it short as long as possible. I say that as a 32-year-old with a two- page resume, but I also have had the opportunity to build a fast-paced career that has allowed me to gain expertise in niche and diverse areas within my larger field. If you do any job hopping early in your career, you will likely move to a two-page resume quicker than a peer that stays in the same company for years.
Additionally, you may adopt two pages when you are at the one-and-a-half mark if you also have publications. I had a phase of my career where I let my experience tip over to a second page and then listed my publications on the remainder of that second page. My publications now need their own designated page, but when they could share space, this middle ground made sense.
However, if you do not have publications, do not tip over and submit a one-and-a-half page resume. Avoid all that white space! Condense it to one page instead. Still keep those valuable experiences listed on a base resume for you to reference at any point, but choose the most pertinent to the job to which you are applying.
Structuring a resume with this formatting and choosing the most important accomplishments to include for each particular job takes a lot of time and thought. But applying to one, two, or three jobs with a standout resume takes a lot less time than submitting 100 mediocre resumes. I hear from people who have actually claimed to submit 100+ resumes recently. You do not have to do this. There are jobs. Just present yourself better than any other applicant. Draft the perfect resume using this guidance, or hire me to draft it for you.
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