Make Your Resume Beautiful – Or Else!
It’s not enough to have the right content; your resume must also be attractive.
If you’ve been following along on the Get-It-Done Guy podcast, you’ll know that we’ve spent the last several episodes learning to write an amazing resume that will get you the job you deserve. Hopefully, you deserve a good one.
Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the How to Write a Great Resume series.
Once upon a time, you would print your finished resume on high-quality paper, and mail your crisp, gorgeous document to your prospective employer. Even the paper itself made an impression. Unfortunately, in these days of the paperless office, that no longer works.
People want resumes electronically. If they print them out, they do it on their own printer. Especially if you’re customizing your resume for each job, you need to make it look beautiful. Fortunately, both Apple’s PAGES and Microsoft Word come with gorgeous resume templates you can use to format your resume.
Use those templates. Your resume should be as easy on the eyes as possible. Bad formatting makes it look like you didn’t care. A standard template looks standard, but it’s well-designed enough to work in your favor.
A friend asked for my feedback on her resume. She sent it over as a Word document. On her machine, it looked perfect. On my machine, the indentation was mismatched, line breaks happened in the middle of job titles, and before I read the first word, I was already looking for reasons to stop reading. It turns out that a beautiful word processing document on one machine can look awful on another.
The solution is to create a PDF of your resume so the formatting and colors are preserved and look the way you want them to, no matter what computer receives the document. Use the *Save As…PDF” function in your favorite word processor, and make sure your resume makes as good an impression on the eye as it does on the brain.
For more savvy advice on improving your career, check out the Quick and Dirty Tips Career page.
Resume sign image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
