Is Your Resume a Showcase or a Thicket?

First impressions matter, and the look of your resume is critical.

Does it attract the eye or repel it? Do your successes leap out or lie buried in a sheet of gray?

The employer’s eye should glide easily into the resume. Yet far too many executive resumes are dense walls of data. Employers should want to know more about you. Cramming makes them want to know less.

Here are a few tips: 

• White space is your friend. It’s not a void. Rather, it’s a potent tool that refreshes the reader, implies quality, and subtly directs the eye. You gain impact with one-inch borders, open line spacing, and indentations—but add white space elsewhere too.
  
  
• Don’t feel trapped in the four corners of a single page. Your history of achievement and promotion may require two or even three pages.
  
  
• Use bullets. They pleasantly snag the gaze. Moreover, stacked items stand out and are much easier to read than a list in a sentence. Avoid cute or fancy bullets, like pointing fingers.
  
  
• Emphasize key items with boldface and italics. Employers are scanning quickly and appreciate these cues. They also spruce up the resume itself.
  
  
• Aid the eye with a serif font. Its tiny hooks improve readability. Examples include Times New Roman, Garamond, and Baskerville. Use sans-serif fonts like Arial only in headers. Avoid showboat fonts as well as Courier.
  
  
• Use at least 11-point type. Smaller sizes suggest cramming.
  
  
• Support it all with top-quality paper. The paper is the pedestal of your resume. It makes a statement about the essence of the document, and about you.