Even small resume mistakes can derail your job search. While a misstep might seem minor in your eyes, to a hiring manager, it comes across as a lack of professionalism or low attention to detail. In either case, that doesn’t work in your favor.
Fortunately, ensuring your resume is on point isn’t as difficult as you’d expect. Here are five things to do before submitting your resume that can help.
1. Proofread, Proofread, Proofread
Spelling and grammar mistakes on a resume are a common pet peeve for hiring managers, and they can commonly cause your resume to end up in the discard pile. Thankfully, this is an easy issue to correct. By doing a round of proofreading yourself and enlisting a trusted family member, friend, or colleague to get another pair of eyes on your application, you can typically catch all of your mistakes.
If you do ask someone to help, make sure you proofread your resume once more when they’re done. That allows you to spot errors on their part, ensuring the final document is in the best shape possible.
2. Check Your Alignment
If you use a design that involves columns, tabs, or another spacing-related formatting, you want to check your resume for alignment. While many spacing features default to specific parameters, it’s also possible to edit and shift the position of many elements. Since that’s the case, you want to make sure everything using a particular spacing tool lines up correctly. Otherwise, your resume can look sloppy.
3. Standardize Your Font
In most cases, you want to limit your font choices to just one or two within your document. Anything beyond that can often feel a bit chaotic, which isn’t ideal when you’re dealing with a resume.
While using just one font is the simplest option, you could potentially use an attractive font pairing if you prefer. That allows you to draw attention to critical parts of your resume, such as your name and the section headings. Just make sure you don’t go past two, as that can get overwhelming visually.
4. Make Sure There’s Whitespace
On a resume, the text needs room to breathe. Without whitespace, your resume becomes hard to read. Plus, large blocks of text are visually unattractive and make your resume look cluttered, which isn’t ideal.
Make sure to limit the length of your bullet points to avoid large text blocks. Additionally, don’t feel like you need to fill the entire page from margin to margin with text, instead leaving some empty space to improve readability.
5. Triple Check Your Contact Information
Even if your resume is stellar, that won’t matter if your contact information is incorrect. You need to make sure the hiring manager can reach you with ease, so review your name, phone number, and email address to ensure it’s accurate.
Additionally, don’t put your contact details in the header. If you do, an applicant tracking system (ATS) may not read the information correctly during an automated screening. As a result, it may think those details are missing or incorrectly fill the blanks in using data from other parts of your resume, which prevents the hiring manager from being able to reach you.
Instead, list your contact details in the body of the document at the top. That ensures the ATS will capture that information.
Contact TekCom Today
If you’d like to learn more about how to ensure your resume is on point, the team at TekCom wants to hear from you. Contact us today.
