Monday, May 04, 2009

No Headers on Resumes

When you create the Heading section (your name and contact information) on your resume, don't use the header function of your document. Why? When the employer opens the document on his computer, your name and contact information will be greyed out. Your name is the most important information on your resume! You want it to be high contrast (black on white) so it will stand out.

The solution is to write your Heading in the body of the document (don't use the header function at all.) By the way, it's perfectly fine to use the footer function for page numbers (for example "page one of one" or "1 of 2").

2 comments:

Maude said...

You can also PDF your resume so that the whole document looks very uniform -- helpful for Mac users who may not draft materials on Microsoft tools.

Susan Ireland said...

Not all employers like getting resumes as PDFs. They can open them but some of their resume databases don't accept PDFs, and search engines can't search them as they can MS Word docs.

The best solution is to email or upload your resume as an MS Word doc, with the Heading in the body of the document, not as a header.