I am a recruiter with 30 years experience reading, critiquing and submitting resumes of candidates for positions with my client companies. In a few cases I can talk about a candidate to my client hiring authority long enough to get an interview for the person. Most of the time I get this simple reply: send me his or her resume and I will look it over. The resume is the document most responsible for your career advancement, employment or unemployment as the case may be. It must be perfect in every respect.

Perfection in every respect means just that. Your vocabulary, spelling, font, margins, type face, and other compositional items must suit the intended usage and readers expectations. It must look equally good on their computer or printed out on paper. It should come through their posting programs intact and it must fit into both the PC and the Mac worlds.

Some canned resume preparation programs or subroutines within Microsoft Word and other text production software programs such as Resume Perfect are good. Most are not. You really should start with a blank document on your screen and compose your resume yourself. Otherwise you will end up with construction artifacts that are nearly impossible to remove. One example of this is text boxes. Some programs insist on adding text boxes and frames to resumes as if they would be displayed as a web page.

Sometimes you may want a web presence for your resume. Mostly, it is a waste of time. Few companies will go to the trouble of bringing it up, and if they did like it they would still have to download it and save it. And you do not know what format they would save it in. Stick with a text format, and dont use boxes.

Many people use bullets or asterisks to highlight lists of items. Unfortunately the bullets are lost in transmission to other machines through data entry sites. The migration to a text display program causes them to appear as strange characters such as %20 or ^20. Surely you dont want your carefully worded document to start every line with a %20. This problem can be avoided by not using any special characters in your resume. Stick with text only.

Font size can also be a problem. Too small a font size will cause the reader to have to expand the resume on their screen and lead to parts being off to the side that will require side to side scrolling. This is a waste of time. You do not want your hiring authority to have to display your resume at 150% to be able to read it.

Conversely, I have seen numerous resumes with the name of the person at the top shows up in 20 point type. That truly looks ridiculous. Save that headline type for when you win the Nobel Prize.

I usually prefer Courier New as a type face. Others are probably as good, but I got used to it as a carryover from typed resumes. Probably many senior hiring authorities are trained the same way and expect a similar type face. Dont use any ultra modern typeface.

Many composition programs such as Word have a spelling and grammar checking function. Checking is one way to identify questionable sentence construction and spelling. Remember however, its only a check, not a totally accurate solution. You must verify each suggested change with your own examination and investigation.

Take a look at the Properties tool in the File menu in Microsoft Word. This information is lodged inside your resume file whenever you send it out. You might be shocked at what you see there. Previous users of your word processing program may have information there that you do not want to send along with your resume. Its not exactly a virus, but data that is not known for its accuracy. I look at that material on every resume just as a little background check on my candidates thoroughness.

You can test some of these parameters with your email friends. Send them your resume; let them take a look at it on their screens and computers. Send one to an associate with a data entry web page or blog site. Print it on your printer and pin it up on the wall and look at it from 20 feet away. How does it compare to some others that you undoubtedly have read over the years. And,download some resumes off the web and take a look at your competitions efforts. How does yours stack up?

Send my firm a copy and I will critique it and give you some comments for free. Its kind of fun for me, and I think you might find it valuable in your search for a better job.

Dan Brockman
http://www.trainingjob.com