Consistent Resume Design

Imagine it is Halloween season and there is only a few more days before the frightful night, you go to visit a vast field of pumpkins in hopes of selecting the perfect pumpkin to turn into the perfect jack-o-latern. Out of the corner of your eyes you spot the most unusual sight, a pink pumpkin ! Without even examining the pink pumpkin or feeling its texture, your attention is grabbed and all the other pumpkins fade into the background. That is the kind of feeling you want to create with a visually stunning resume. A visually stunning resume will leap out of the stack of homogenous resumes and grab your employers attention, and will force them to read your resume with extra care and attention.

What is a visually stunning resume ? How does it look and more importantly how do you create one ? These are not easily answered questions, but I suspect that most people have a good idea at what a visually stunning resume looks like. It is like beauty, hard to describe , but we recongize it when we see it. Take an honest look at your resume, does your resume say, “I’m beautiful, I derserve your attention” ?

In the next several posts, I want to talk about and examine various factors I think will create a visually stunning resume.

The first step to creating a visually stunning resume, is to ensure that your resume has a consistent look, so that your resume won’t look like a jumbled mess.Your resume can’t be beautiful, if it’s ugly. Here is a check list of items that you want to make sure are consistent throughout your resume and that won’t stick out like a sore thumb:

·         Font

·         Line Spacing

·         Usage of Tabs

·         Font Size of Headers and Text

·         Bullet Styles

·         White Space

A common mistake people seem to make, is that they change the format of a certain section of their resume to highlight the section. Sure, changing a sections format will make it standout , but it will make your overall resume look disjointed. That highlighted section will feel out of place and it will lower your resumes overall visual appeal.