Resume Design Tips and Techniques
By now you are in college and, chances are, you have been building your resume over the past few years. Making or improving a resume is usually something that students dread spending much time on. I mean, why should you spend hours working on perfecting your resume when recruiters may only spend seconds reviewing it? According to a study from TheLadders, a career news company, “recruiters spent about 6 seconds on their initial ‘fit/no fit’ decision.” The short amount of time employers spend reviewing resumes shows us that they are looking for a few key things. The most important thing you can do with your resume to possibly land an interview is to have proper form and design. Here are some tips that will help:
Don’t Use Templates
When making your resume for the first time, you may not know where to begin. People often think there is a set way to make a resume so they turn to Google, hoping to find the best templates. In reality, resume templates are not the best to use because a majority of them give a basic design that employers have seen many times before. You don’t want to be too extreme with the appearance of your resume, but you definitely want to stand apart from other candidates. Templates are not a great way to do so. You should only resort to using a template if you are awful with technology and design. For most of our generation, this is not the case. It may take some playing around with the features in Microsoft Word, but designing your own resume should not be too challenging.
Proper Design Techniques
Everyone has their own sense of style when it comes to design. Some recruiters may personally like how you design your resume, whereas others may not. In order to have the best possible design that will appease the most amount of employers, you need to have a sense of proper design principles. There are four widely know design principles: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. These principles are often taught to students with the acronym C.R.A.P. as an easy way to remember them.
Contrast is how you split up the elements of your resume. Using things like text styles, colors, or line borders for your headings will allow the person viewing the resume to easily see where to find certain information. If your entire resume uses the same font size and text style without any contrast to signal separation, it will be difficult to read and employers would likely toss it to the side before attempting to pick out the information they are looking for.
Repetition, as a design principle, does not necessarily mean repeating the same style. It refers to consistency with your design. If the academic section of your resume features a bulleted list, the extracurricular section should as well (rather than a list with dashes or a numbered list). Certain types of headings on your resume should have the same text style for consistency. When designing your headings, think of level headings in APA style. Each type of heading should follow an organizational structure that creates distinguishable sections.
Alignment is focused on the visual appearance of your resume as a whole. Similar to repetition, consistency is key to having proper alignment. Each section should be positioned the same way on the page, with the same line spacing and margins. Nothing should appear as out of place compared to the other aspects of your resume design.
Proximity involves putting similar items near each other. Placing similar information close together improves readability. On a resume, you want to keep all appropriate descriptions under specific headings so that everything is organized and easy to find. Generally, contact information should be positioned near the top of a resume, followed by academics or professional experience.
Focus Your Resume
One of the most important parts of your resume is your name and contact information. Recruiters should be able to see your name, email, and phone number before moving onto the rest of the resume. This way, they will know they can contact you if they like your skills and qualifications. You should consider making the font of your name different and larger than other headings on your resume, and give your contact information a simple font style below or next to your name.
Along with your name and contact information, the first section of the body of your resume is also extremely important. This section should be focused on your best qualifications. If you are still in college and have not had much professional experience, maybe a section highlighting your academics should come first. You could include achievements such as the Dean’s List, or other awards, accomplishments, and big projects you have worked on throughout your college career. Just make sure that you are specializing your resume to fit the job that you are applying to as much as possible. Constantly adjusting your resume can be annoying, but including your achievements and experiences that prove you would fit the role will help you in the long run.
Creating a resume can be challenging, but it is best that you learn how to make one by using proper design techniques. Your resume represents you to someone you have not met before, so you don’t’ want to simply fill your information into a template you found online – make your resume your own. Not one resume is going to be the exact same as another, just as two people are not the same. Remember to focus your resume on you and your experiences, while keeping the position you are applying for in mind.