Fonts and spacing: my honest limits, and "make it readable"
Okay you guys. Last lesson we talked about why the fancy templates break the scanning software. Today's the follow-up, and I have to be upfront about something first.
I am not a design person. Fonts and spacing and all the little visual choices — that's genuinely not my strength, and I've told people that flat out in this class before. My own résumés are plain. Part of that is on purpose, because plain is what works. But part of it is honestly just that I don't have the eye for it. I'm not going to pretend I can teach you typography. I can teach you "make it readable," and that's what we're doing today.
So let's keep it simple.
The font
Pick one font. Not two, not three. One.
Use something plain. Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Garamond — any of those are fine. If you don't know what to pick, pick Calibri and move on. This is not the place to express your personality. Nobody has ever gotten a callback because of their font choice, but plenty of people have gotten filtered out because their font choice confused a scanner or looked unprofessional to a human skimming fast.
Size: 10 to 12 point for your body text. Your name at the top can be a little bigger, 14 to 16, so it stands out. That's it. That's the whole font lesson.
The spacing
Here's what I actually look for when I'm walking around the room checking résumés:
- Can I tell where one job ends and the next one starts, at a glance, without reading closely?
- Is there consistent space between sections, so it doesn't look cramped?
- Are your margins reasonable — not so wide your résumé looks empty, not so narrow it looks like you crammed it in?
Half-inch to one-inch margins is a safe range. If you're fighting to fit everything on one page, that's not a spacing problem, that's a content problem, and you go back and cut lines, you don't shrink the margins down to nothing to make it fit. A résumé with 0.3-inch margins and 9-point font crammed edge to edge is hard to read and it looks like you're hiding something. Cut the content instead.
Bold and headers, used sparingly
Bold your job titles or your section headers, pick one, be consistent about it. Don't bold your bullet points. Don't bold random phrases you think are impressive. If everything is bold, nothing is, and it just looks noisy.
Same with all caps — fine for a section header like EXPERIENCE or EDUCATION, not fine for a whole paragraph. It's harder to read and it looks like you're shouting.
Bullets, not paragraphs
If you've got a job description written as a paragraph, break it into bullets. A hiring manager skimming fast — and they're all skimming fast — needs to be able to drop their eyes down a list and pick out what matters. A paragraph makes them work for it. Nobody's going to do that work. They'll just move to the next résumé in the pile.
Test it yourself before you trust it
Here's the practical step I want you to actually do at home. Save your résumé as a PDF and open it on a different device than the one you wrote it on. Print it, too, if you have a printer, even just to check it once. What looks fine on your laptop screen sometimes shifts around on a phone or looks different printed — margins jump, a section header that fit fine suddenly wraps weird. You want to catch that before a hiring manager does.
I do this with basically everything in my life, not just résumés. I keep a spreadsheet of every job I've applied to — what I sent, when, what happened. I photograph the confirmation screen when I submit something, same as I photograph my canned tomatoes when I'm done with a canning day. It's not because I'm fancy about record-keeping. It's because if you don't write it down, you're just guessing later about what worked. Same idea here — check your own document like it's evidence, not like it's finished the second you stop typing.
My opinion, for what it's worth
Plain and clean beats pretty every time. I know that's not exciting to hear. Some of you spent real time last lesson building something with columns and shading and I told you to throw it out. I'll say the same thing about fonts. A résumé that's easy to read beats a résumé that looks like it took effort. Those aren't always the same document.
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Before next time: Open your résumé, check your font count (should be one), check your margins, and break any paragraph-style job descriptions into bullets. Bring the cleaned-up version next time.