How important are the font and the font size for your resume?

How important are the font and the font size for your resume?

How important are the font and the font size for your resume?

The short answer is easy to guess.

How important are the font and the font size for your resume?

The long answer, which is not actually so long, is in this article.

The elements of a professional and engaging resume

Nowadays, people from all parts of the world say that creative resumes are the best.

And this is true.

But a professional resume, and we all want such a resume, need to have certain elements.

When having all these elements, the chances to be hired are much higher.

Photo of you

It is not mandatory but if you don’t include one, your resume will look highly incomplete.

I personally know companies, big ones, that are not even looking on resumes that are not having a picture included.

Why is that?

They consider that these candidates didn’t invest enough time in preparing their resumes.

And this is actually right.

Why would you not put a picture on your resume?  

If you would be the hiring person, you would want to see the candidate, right?

So, the best thing to do is to ask a professional photographer to help you with this picture.

Pay huge attention to the clothes you wear, where you take the picture, how you smile, which is your body language, and everything else.

Don’t use an old photo of you, even if that photo is amazing. If you will do that, there is a huge chance that you will not be recognized at the interview.

It happened to me several times, in huge corporations. Before going to meetings, I was looking for that person on LinkedIn and other places, and most of them had 10 years old pictures.

Text

The text you will include and its order defers quite a lot for many countries and industries.

If there is a local best practice that you know about, respect it or at least take it into consideration, you might include a part of it or all of it.

Design

The design of your resume is highly important, especially if you apply to high tech companies or creative companies.

If you dream to work as an engineer at Tesla, you need to pay huge attention to your resume design.

Don’t get a template, not even a premium one.

If you really want to maximize your chances to obtain the job, hire a designer and work with him for a fully customized and special resume.

Video

Embed a video on your resume, this is something that few persons do but which has a huge impact.

The cost to do it is very small, you can record yourself wherever you want.

Contact details

Contact details are part of the text right, but you should have a separate design for them.

Make them viewable.

Clean, short, and concise

You want your resume to stand out of the crowd.

For that, you should have a short, clean, and concise resume.

Only a talented and experienced graphic designer can help you, again, don’t use a template.

How important are the font and the font size for your resume?

This is the main topic of the article, and I am happy to share with you the importance of the font in a resume.

When someone open your resume, they see one big picture.

The big picture is the overall design, which is made out of all the above elements.

Now imagine this big picture in a small font size.

It would look terrible, right?

What about a hard to read font?

Again, your resume will be unfunctional, being difficult to read.

So which fonts and font sizes work best for your resume?

It highly depends on your industry, on your personal style, and on the designer, you work with.

But you should pay attention to these font tips for your resume:

– Free fonts are used by the whole planet. Use them only if they are an exceptional good fit for your resume design.

– You want your font to complement your resume design, and not overtake it. Don’t go for highly complicated fonts.

– Premium fonts are nice but don’t overdo it. Don’t get a font that is $500, maybe your interviewer knows about this and you will create a weird image.

– Do lots of tests. Try as many fonts as possible, and check how they look on your resume.

– Pick a font size that helps you have a short resume but which doesn’t affect the readability.

– Font color. Stay with black if you don’t work with an experienced graphic designer, it is the safest option.

Conclusions

All the elements of a resume are important but the font and the font size can ruin your resume in milliseconds.

Yes, that fast.

Follow the above tips and make your resume stand out of the crowd.