Blog Post: The font to express "Who You Are "

     There are a lot of things you can do to make your résumé stand out…The first thing to remember is that, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. 

This is why: 

     1)  There is NOT a magic font that will distract the hiring manager from the fact that a résumé is incomplete or poorly written. In fact, a non-standard font is more likely to draw attention to deficiencies.

     2)   An unusual font is harder to read. It slows the hiring manager down, but not in a good way. Think of driving to an appointment and getting stuck behind someone who is driving ten miles below the speed limit, sashaying down the road with their speakers blaring. Got your attention? Yep. Are you impressed? Nope—at least not in a positive way. What do you do? You usually try to pass them and get away from them as fast as possible. 

     So which fonts work? 

     It’s actually fairly straightforward. You want to make your résumé as easy to read as possible…so you use:

      1)   Times New Roman (this is a serif font—meaning it has the little “tails” on the letters which helps the eye move smoothly from letter to letter) or

      2)    Arial (which is a san-serif font—meaning it doesn’t have the tails, and has a “cleaner” appearance as a result). 

     Pick one—not both. Invariably, when people try to use both font styles within their résumés, they slip up and break the pattern they thought they had established. And nothing makes a résumé look more unprofessional than a mishmash of fonts or inconsistent stylistic decisions such as bolding or italicizing. 

     Choose to bold your characters or italicize them can be a very effective way to organize your résumé, but it is important that you are consistent at each level. For instance, if you decide to bold and italicize the categories, it is important to set that as a rule and follow it all the way through. 

     A lot of the effectiveness of your résumé is in the picky little details…and in making sure you impress with the words you put together, not with errors, style inconsistencies, or bizarre fonts.