From the course: Writing a Resume

Tips for college grads and early careers

From the course: Writing a Resume

Tips for college grads and early careers

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- Is your resume full of white space? Does it scream in experience? Whether you are a newly-minted college graduate or you've been out of the workforce for a few years, you've probably grown tired of being rejected due to a lack of experience. Let's take a look at some examples and ideas for structuring your resume to make your experience or lack thereof look appealing to the reader. Putting your education at the top of the resume will alert the reader that you probably don't have much experience to back up your degree. So if you have internships, volunteer work, and actual work experience that you can include, there's nothing wrong with including that information before your education. But keeping with tradition works too. If your education is your biggest asset, go ahead and place it right upfront. An objective will make it clear that you meet the requirements of the job, especially if your degree is not relevant to the job you are applying to. If your degree is in accounting and you're applying for an engineering position, you're going to have some explaining to do, and that explanation will start with your objective and then carry over into your experience. But for purposes of filling space on your resume, an objective helps to do that too. A caveat to this is that everything you include should still be relevant and stay within resume writing guidelines. Margins are important. You don't want your resume to have too wide of a margin. So keep the margin size to nothing larger than the standard One inch. When your resume is printed and lying among the other resumes whose owners adjusted their margins to half an inch, your resume can look even more inadequate. Try utilizing a different font size. Start with a 12 point, Times New Roman font. Then if you want to switch to a different serif font, remember that each font may appear larger or smaller based upon the type of font, not just the font size. As an example, the Arial round typeface will appear larger than Times New Roman, even if they are the same font size. Again, if you go with an overly large font, it will look amateurish when sitting among the other resumes that the reader has printed. It will stand out, but not for a good reason. You can use a larger font size for the section headers, but don't go more than two font sizes larger than the overall text in your resume. Meaning if the main text of your resume is 11 points, do not go larger than 13 points for the section headers. The only exception to this is with your name. At the top of your resume you can make your name larger, which will also help to take up white space on the page. Adding a space between the name of the company and the job title or the job responsibilities is another aesthetically pleasing way to fill up space on your resume without making it obvious just what you're trying to do. While you may feel you need to fill space on your resume, this is not an excuse to begin adding hobbies, your photo, or personal information like your height, marital status, or gender. If you have been simply widening your margins, try some of these other tactics to help you further build out your resume.

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