One of the biggest mistakes I see in resume drafting is sloppy formatting. Often, sloppy formatting is a result of an ill-fated attempt to make the formatting look extra clever or professional. Before you try anything fancy with the formatting, do an honest assessment of your computer skills. Unless you are very good with computers, I generally advise you to stick with a simple format.
What is a simple format? Simple formats are generally aligned left (headings may be aligned center) with commas or semi-colons separating the elements. For example, an example of a simply formatted education entry would be as follows:
Fordham University School of Law, New York, NY
Candidate for LL.M. in International Business & Trade Law, May 2012
What if we wanted a more complicated format? One of the most common examples of "bad" formatting I see is when people attempt to align things like dates on the right. People who are less computer savvy tend to accomplish this by tabbing the date over to the right, as illustrated below.
This might look fine at first, but it is difficult to maintain. You have to constantly mind the tabs. If you later go back and edit your document, say you decide to change "LL.M." to "Master of Laws," the new text will move the position of your date by pushing the tabbing over. In this case, it pushes the date partially onto the next line, as illustrated below.
If you are not extra attentive to this, your document can end up looking sloppy. Luckily, there is a formatting trick you can use to avoid this problem: inserting a table. To align things to the right, create a two cell table (the cell on the right should be just wide enough to fit the text), then align the text in the first cell left and align the text in the second cell right, as illustrated below.
This way, when you alter the text on the left, you will not change the position of the text on the right, as illustrated below:
To finish, remove the borders of the table, as shown here:
When you print or convert to a PDF, you will not see the table, just a cleanly formatted document.
Better to use word format for resumes, because it makes hiring manager to feel comfort while scanning.
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Gene,
ReplyDeleteI disagree that using Word is better, as the formatting in a Word document can shift when the document is opened on a different machine or with a different version of Word. They then end up looking unprofessional. PDF documents will never be altered in this way and always look polished.
Best,
Kandice
Hi Kandice,
ReplyDeletePDF format is not mostly used by the people, because every company will not maintain software for converting the PDF format to word format.
I'm not sure if you are referring to the U.S. or another country. In the U.S., Adobe (PDF) is commonly used and there is no need for a company to convert a PDF file to a Word document. I cannot speak for other countries. Thus, I stand by my advice.
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