Resume Formatting Matters
Last week, I shared that that I have been privileged to serve on a task force for the State of Massachusetts Department of Elder Affairs which focuses on barriers to employment for those over 50 years old.
I talked about the roundtable brainstorming sessions I have led regarding employment for mature workers with top human resources executives across several industries in Greater Boston. We also collect live feedback from heads of state agencies focused on employment and hundreds of 50+ workers who have been actively engaged in a search.
One of the critical issues we identified for all workers, not just mature ones, was that many job seekers don’t know how important formatting decisions on a resume can be. They don’t understand that there are hundreds of applicant tracking systems available to employers, and that no common protocol exists to govern how these applications handle resumes.
The wisest course of action, therefore, is to build a resume that will work with the least sophisticated systems. That means using a common font (I use Arial) and avoiding any kind of fancy stylistic choices. Headers, footers, columns, section breaks, shading, images, and tables can all interfere with a resume being imported or read properly. You can have the best content in the world, and it won’t matter if it can’t be read by a computer.
It is also important to know that some of these systems strip out formatting, which can make a beautifully formatted document very unbeautiful. Several years ago, I stopped doing page numbers or adding the applicants’ names on the top of page 2 or 3. I made that call after I saw too many resumes coming back with that info in the middle of the page after a computer resized the document.
The purpose of having contact info on the top of the page in the old days was to safeguard against pages getting separated in the stack. Nowadays, resumes aren’t handled physically as much, making that concern somewhat moot.
It is also important to use the correct language in the section headings. Always use terms like Professional Experience, Work Experience, or Work History; avoid using cute or creative headings because a computer may not be able to find the most important part of the document to scan for keywords! So, Education would be titled…wait for it...Education!
If you heard that objective statements are passe, you heard right. They were replaced by summary statements many years ago. A summary statement should focus on the impact you will bring and how you are qualified to do so. While an objective was focused on what you want, the summary is tailored toward what the employer needs.
Always list the employer’s name on a line above the job title. This is the default for a number of these systems. Don’t have these two fields reversed or on the same line. Dates of employment can be shown in parentheses next to each job title.
If possible, use Microsoft Word to build it. Every single company in our survey base used Word. Almost all of them used pdf, provided the actual content was saved using recent Adobe tools and not scanned in as a photo. Surprisingly, Google Docs and Pages are not well accepted.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is no RULE for resume length or lookback. But our surveys did show some strong patterns of preference. The majority of employers we asked expressed a preference for a one pager for entry level and two pages for experienced candidates. Most were open to three pages if the older experience was relevant to the job they are recruiting for.
And last, but not least, there was a preference on how much work history was appropriate to share. The survey group was mostly split between those who preferred 10 years and those who favored 15. Some outliers wanted everything (I don’t think those were the two-page limit folks though!). I work with a lot of older workers, so I usually go with 15 years.
Some job seekers started their careers with very prestigious employers 30 or 40 years ago. This could be a big four accounting firm, world famous ad agency, Michelin Star restaurant, etc. In those cases. I recommend creating a previous experience line or heading that would include the employer’s name, job title, and nothing else. This technique allows us to avoid using dates from the 60s and 70s, but it also doesn’t show a gap if the resume otherwise goes back 10 or 15 years.
The number of years of lookback is an important factor for older workers particularly because if an employer is asking for 5 to 8 years’ experience a resume showing 35 to 38 years does not match. Your job as a candidate is to show how you match, not broadcast how you are wildly more “experienced” that the job posting asks for.
