Home » Working Women » A New Job » Crafting the Right Resume Appearance

Your resume has your career history, your education, your commitment to your employers, your dreams, all ascribed on a sheet of white paper titled, at the top, with your name. To be effective, a resume must adhere to one rule: information must be delivered in an attractive, efficient, and easily accessible manner.

The properly prepared resume of a less-experienced candidate can trump a poor resume from a more-experienced candidate. The difference between a good resume and a bad one is the difference between a new job and continued unemployment. Keeping in mind a few simple rules, you can write an effective and a powerful resume.

Here are a few simple rules about a resume's basic look.

Font

Don't get creative. What you want in a font is not a decorative design choice, but a simple, easily readable font that shows you mean business.

Your font should not look like handwriting or like italicized versions of regular fonts. This is a business document, not a thank you note to a neighbor. And these fonts are difficult to read. What impresses readers the most are not the letters on the page but the words they spell.

Paper

Avoid brightly colored papers. Outlandishly colored resumes are to be used by people whose jobs demand more dramatic visual statements: hairdressers, fashion designers and clowns. The rest of us need to focus on the understated dignity of whites, and light grays. Use the same paper for your cover letter.

Envelope

While many employers say they do not focus their attentions on the envelope a document is sent in, others do. To some, a rsums wrapper can be a factor in their evaluation. Typing the envelope is especially important if you have messy handwriting.

Scanning

Since so many businesses now, scan resumes into computers, so they can be better accessed for future reference, a job applicant has to consider a few additional factors about his resume's appearance. Scanners often have a difficult time reading underlined, italicized and bolded text or any unusual font. Scanning also can create problems for those who write their resumes on anything but plain white paper. Even gray and white-flecked paper has been known to cause problems on certain scanners. A good way to test your paper's scan ability is to photocopy your resume printed on the paper you plan on using. If the copy comes out blurred, dark, specked, or anything but white, think again about sending it out to a big company: their scanners might not be able to distinguish the information on the page from the page itself.

While the resumes are often organized according to the industry, they are most often pulled from within those categories by keyword searches, which means that it's more important than ever that you use the correct terminology in describing your knowledge and experience.

Writing resumes is, after all, fundamentally a marketing act. It's a way to advertise yourself and stand out in the marketplace crowd of similarly competent, qualified workers.