How To Format Your Professional Resume For Maximum Impact

With just 6-8 seconds to grab the recruiter’s attention, the way you format your resume should make the most important information clear and easy to find.

Despite this, too many professionals will spend hours going over the content only to drop this into a document without much thought or care.

Of course, the content is important and is the primary source for securing an interview, but a poorly formatted resume can cost even the most impressive and experienced professional the job.

That is why getting your format right and utilizing this for maximum impact is absolutely crucial. Here’s how to do just that.

Use clear headings

Your resume should be divided into at least five clear sections, including your contact details, resume summary, key skills, experience, and education. At this stage in your career, it’s unlikely you’ll need to include a hobbies or references section.

In order to maximize these sections, it’s important to use clear headings and subheadings. This will help to better organize your information within. For example, using ‘work experience’ as a main heading, followed by smaller subheadings outlining each of your most recent positions.

Breaking up your information in this way makes it easier for the recruiter to quickly scan through and find the keywords and details they are looking for. You can also use bold, italics, and underlines to further organize or highlight key information.

Be concise with bullet points

When writing your resume, you may have a lot to say about your impressive career, but big chunks of text can be off-putting for the reader. Instead, you need to make sure that you are using smaller paragraphs containing more brief but engaging statements and utilizing bullet points wherever possible.

There are several ways in which you might wish to use bullet points to format the information and keep it clear and concise. Firstly, you can use bullet points in your key skills section to make these easy to scan through and take on board.

You can also use them to outline your top responsibilities and achievements in your work experience section, along with academic accomplishments in your education section where relevant. This breaks up the information to avoid big chunks of text and also gives you a chance to be more selective and deliberate about the facts and figures you choose to include under these sections.

Think about your font

When you’re already juggling content, formatting, and structure as you write your resume, the last thing on your mind is likely to be what font to use. However, this can be a huge part of formatting your application, and the wrong font could land you on the rejection pile pretty quickly.

It’s crucial that you choose an easy-to-read font that doesn’t distract from the quality of your content and the information within. Some of the best fonts you can choose are the classics like Times New Roman, Cambria, Georgia, Helvetica, Calibri, and Trebuchet MS.

You also need to think about the size of your font. It should definitely not be smaller than size 10, though 11 or 12 is more effective and won’t require the reader to squint.

Don’t leave margin for error

The size of your text is not the only important formatting issue; you also need to make sure that your margins are not too big or small either.

It can be tempting to make your margins smaller to get more text on the page. While this does work, your margins should never be smaller than 0.5 inches, and in an ideal world, they should be at least one inch all the way around.

This keeps your resume looking neat and tidy, as well as ensures that you don’t have large, stretched blocks of text that look unprofessional and unsightly to the recruiter. On the flip side, you also don’t make these too big to try and fill the page, as this can imply you don’t have enough to talk about.

Choose an appropriate length for your resume

Finally, it’s important to remember that recruiters are busy people, and they don’t have time to be flicking through long resumes full of irrelevant information. That is why recent graduates or entry-level professionals are encouraged to stick to just one page per application.

However, if you’re a senior professional with more years of experience under your belt, you can afford to extend your resume to two pages. In fact, 90% of recruiters say they prefer a two-page resume.

So while you need to choose a format that is an appropriate length and that only contains relevant and useful information, it’s also helpful to give yourself more room for great content. That way, you can add more of your key achievements and really maximize your work experience section.

Though these formatting tips might seem straightforward, you’d be surprised how many professionals still get them wrong, even after years in the working world. So once you’ve written your content, take some time to think about how you format your resume for maximum impact.