Face to Face
With Fred Coon

May 25, 2004 - 20 Pet Peeves Recruiters Have About Resumes
Courtesy of Mike Worthington, ResumeDoctor.com

# 5 - Poor Formatting

"A resume is the first impression an employer (or recruiter) will receive about you and your qualifications. If the presentation is not cleaned up in a professional manner (formatting), it is immediately thrown in file 13 (the trash can)," Mark King, MRI Atlanta.

It is paramount that your resume is clean, clear and not full of major formatting errors. Paul Philbin of Technisource in Phoenix, Arizona says, "Poor formatting is a huge frustration of mine. Making sure that the resume is in a clearly readable format can make a huge difference. My job is to provide hiring managers with resumes that don't waste their time. If the manager has to scale the resume to get to what he/she is looking for, then that manager will not be interested."

Clean formatting goes much beyond making a resume look pretty. Most candidates are unaware that many formatting features will not view well on a computer screen, and more importantly, will not download properly into many HRIS recruiting systems or job boards. Recruiters are reading your resume on the computer screen. BE WARNED! Just because a resume looks well when presented on the printed page, does not necessary mean it will read well on a computer screen. Keep in mind there are inherent problems when viewing a resume on the computer screen. The biggest problem being that only 1/3 of the page is displayed at any one given time. It is extra important that a recruiter have the ability to easily hold down the scroll bar and skim down your resume.

Formatting issues to be aware of:

• Red and Green Squiggly Lines - These are distracting and say to the reader, "I don't know how to use Word!"
  
  
• Poor Alignment of Bullets and Tab Stops - Bullets should be aligned cleanly on the page and not indented all over the place. Not only does this make for tough reading, it will also cause huge problems when your resume is downloaded onto a job board or HRIS recruiting system. This also goes for copious amounts of tab stops. There is no reason to have more than 3 or 4 tab stops in your resume.
  
  
• Headers and Footers - Many candidates use this MS Word feature to present their address and contact info. Well guess what? This is one of the worst things you can do! The chances that your contact info will be converted are slim to none. You could be the perfect candidate for the position, but your saved resume offers no way for you to be contacted!
  
  
• Boxes, Graphical Lines and Columns - Once again, none of these fancy formatting features will be saved in any recruiting system and will simply cause major formatting problems later.
  
  
• Templates and Tables - No recruiter likes a resume chock full of templates or tables. A candidate's resume could wind up looking like scrambled eggs when posted on the job boards or into a recruiters database system. Recruiters will often cut and paste a candidate's resume to their company letterhead when they submit the candidate to their client. Cutting and pasting a template resume is next to impossible and requires EXTENSIVE re-formatting. Someone please tell Mr. Gates at Microsoft, eliminate the Resume Template feature from Word; it only causes huge problems.
  
  
• Margins Too Wide - Many candidates push their margins to the far reaches of the earth in order to get that resume down to 2 pages. These candidates are not fooling anyone and are most likely making the resume very difficult to read on a computer screen. Anytime a recruiter must use the horizontal scroll bar to read a resume, you have lost him/her! Furthermore, "word wrap" is very likely to occur when moving to text format, posting to job boards, or to recruiting systems.

In closing, Bob Lee of Management Recruiters in Jacksonville, FL shares, "Without a doubt, the largest problem we have is formatting of resumes. With the new recruiting software on the market, importing resumes is a snap; however, when a resume is over formatted with multiple type fonts, heavy graphic trickery, "ghost" backgrounds, etc., it raises hell with the input process. When we receive a good candidate with a poorly formatted resume, we immediately fire off an email requesting a simple WORD document in (.doc) or (.rtf) format. All others that come in who we are not interested in re-formatting, get canned on the spot. We can't take the time to 'un-format'!"

Recruiter Tip: To see what your WORD document resume will look like as a text file, (as it will most likely appear on the major job boards), take your Word document resume and paste it into NOTEPAD. The major job boards generally do not retain font changes and complex MS WORD formatting functions. You can then make any minor formatting changes as necessary within NOTEPAD. Another idea before uploading your resume to a job board such as NET-TEMPS, is to "save-as file type" MS-DOS Text. This too will give you a general idea as to what your resume will look like when a recruiter views your resume on the job board in his/her search.

Recruiter’s likes and dislikes in a resume were surveyed nation-wide by Mike Worthington of ResumeDoctor.com. FACE to FACE will publish all twenty pet peeves in this column over the next months.

ResumeDoctor.com is a service provided by Personnel Department Inc. PDI is Vermont’s largest independently owned staffing agency. They have been locally owned and operated for over 14 years. They have been featured in many publications, TV news programs, and radio broadcasts. You may contact them at: http://www.resumedoctor.com.

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About the Author: Fred Coon