LOOK & FEEL of a Good Resume

Let us go through the small steps you took when you uploaded your last Instagram Story?

- Clicked at least 6-7 pictures including few selfies

- Spent 15 minutes on deciding which one is the best in terms of background, your expressions, angle etc.

- Try and apply 10-15 filters to see which suits the best

- Think of a catchy phrase or a line to describe the emotions behind the picture

- Look out for an appropriate font style

- Add a couple of GIFs

And yes we are finally ready with our Story…!!!

Why these Efforts at all?

Because we understand the importance of a pleasant looking and an attractive photo for our Instagram story. It will definitely pull in more likes and comments. That’s the ultimate goal, right??

Similar is the case with Resume Building….

Investing Efforts in making a Resume look enticing enough for a recruiter is very important. Lets look at the different areas that need our attention here:

A. Font Style: Always use Serif font styles on a Resume. They exhibit stability, respectability, conventionalism along with being formal. Few examples are Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond, Didot, Baskerville, Cambria

Use only 1 font style throughout the document.

B. Font Size: Ideal size range for printable fonts is 10-14 pts. For a Resume, standard font sizes are size 12 for main body and size 14 for titles or section headers. Incase the content doesn’t fit in a page, then font size for the content can be reduced to size 11 or 10 and header size to 12. Maintain uniformity from top to bottom.

C. Use of Colours: Resume is not a canvass to be experimented on with colours. Body content should be written in BLACK only with white background. To highlight section headers, colours like darker shades of Blue, Grey, Brown, Red can be used.

D. Style of Writing: Recruiter on an average spends only 6 seconds on a Resume. So data must be presented in the most convenient-to-read way possible. Some tips for effective display of data are:

- Information divided in separate sections with appropriate headers

- Bullet Points to describe work experience, internships, extracurriculars etc.

- BOLD for important keywords and data points

What NOT to do?

- Do NOT use Paragraphs

- Do NOT use graphics and charts

- Do NOT give too much of data

Check out How to beat the upcoming ATS systems for resume screening