By: Kandice Thorn
When students come to me for career counseling, they are often surprised by the amount of time I spend on seemingly insignificant minutiae in their resumes and cover letters. I take their formatting and eliminate indentations and bullet points; I turn an en-dash into an em-dash or vice versa for consistency; I remove stray commas or other punctuation. It sometimes takes several drafts to get to a point where we can really focus on the substance of the document. This might seem trivial, but this morning as I was reviewing resumes for an undergraduate student worker position in our office, I was reminded just how important these "little things" are.
We received many applications for the student worker position. Like many law students, none of these student worker applicants had a significant amount of work experience, so we had to find some way of distinguishing those we wanted to pursue from those we would not follow up with. One person had a typo in her email address; she went into the "no" pile. Another had a three page resume that was so badly formatted I could hardly pick out the headings; another "no." And so on. The first set of "no's" were weeded out without any reference to qualifications. They were weeded out solely on the basis of their messy resumes. If someone gives me a messy resume, I know that I can expect even messier work product and I am not willing to take a chance on that person.
The detail in your resume is what is going to get you through that initial pick so that the reviewer may actually consider the substance of your resume. Every punctuation, every indentation, every space, every bit of italicized text matters. It will be noticed--or rather, hopefully it will not be noticed. Good formatting is rarely noticed. Bad formatting and typos, unfortunately, tend to jump off the page. Give these "little things" the respect they deserve, and your resume will earn it's place in the "maybe" pile, hopefully awaiting an upgrade into the "yes" pile.
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