Here’s one for all those recent college grads seeking to land their first post-college jobs and also for those more experienced players .
As someone in a management role, I can tell you that there are few things that will get your cover letter and resume dumped in the round file (the trash can) faster than if either or both are poorly written, riddled with typos, or in a font I need a magnifying glass to read. Crazy formatting ranks up there, too. To lend a hand, I’m going to give you a tip list. It also helps me vent a little, of course.
DON’T forget to run the spell checker on your cover letter, resume, and any other documents you are including. In Microsoft Word, it’s as easy as hitting the F7 key. (And, if you don’t know what key I’m talking about, we have a whole new problem.) Then, after you let the spell checker run, read through the entire document yourself, out loud, to catch all typos that the spell checker didn’t catch. And, there will be typos it didn’t catch. This is especially important if you’re filling in your job experience and other skills into text boxes on an online form that doesn’t have a spell checker. More than two typos in your submitted documents make you look SLOPPY and DISORGANIZED.
DO pick one of these fonts for your resume and cover letter: Arial, Courier New (although most people don’t like this one), Garamond, Times New Roman, or Verdana. These are universally accepted as readable fonts, although with Garamond, you may need to bump up the font size, because it runs a little small. Deviation from these fonts, because you think another is cute, fun, pretty, cool, sophisticated, or worst of all whimsical, is unacceptable. You’re applying for a job, not showing your potential employer how clever you are.
DON’T make your font less than 10 points in size. I don’t care if this is the only way you could make your cover letter fit on one page or keep your resume to two pages (and, yes, these are all the longer either of these documents should be). If you can’t keep these documents to the proper length any other way than shrinking the font, you put too much into them. Take words out, unimportant words that your future employer will know immediately are fluff that you packed in to make yourself sound like a better candidate. The preferable font size is 11 or 12 point. Anything smaller, and we need to get out our glasses, and the annoyance factor goes up.
DO be consistent with the font you choose and the formatting style. Switching fonts midway through your cover letter or resume is the same as a typo. This holds true for job title/employer and employment date formats. For example, if you start out with saying you worked for Company X from January 2005 to March 2007, switching to saying you worked for Company Y from 4/2007 – 5/2009 is an error that will be noticed.
DON’T get fancy with your formatting. Adding tables and putting your skills, job experience, and education into neat little cells may seem like a good idea, but I can tell you from having looked at enough of those types of resumes, more often than not, the table formatting goes awry once it reaches the hiring manager. And, don’t try to center justify a bunch of text, the same thing as with tables usually happens. My suggestion is to make all of your text left justified (name and contact info in the header can be centered without prejudice). However, if you really must get fancy with tables and such, because you feel you just have to show off your skills in Word, try converting it to PDF form when you’re done. There are several free tools out there for converting Word docs to PDF. Google Docs is my favored method.
Now, you may argue that I’m wrong and that the skills you have to offer will trump all cover letter and resume issues. But, you would be wrong. Some employers won’t even finish reading a poorly written cover letter or resume, and if they do, they’re looking at your skills and experience through the vaguely red haze of irritation that you couldn’t afford their job opening enough respect to proofread your submission before you sent it to them.
-- Statler, Moderator
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