As job seekers, we want to draw attention to key details on our resume—our name, educational background, experience, specialized skills, etc.
Unfortunately, for many that means bolding pretty much everything on their resume. And not just bolding, bolding something that’s already capitalized, italicized, and underlined. If writing in all caps in an email is the equivalent of yelling, just imagine what all that overemphasis means on your resume.
Although there are no universal rules on what you should bold, I usually stick to the guidelines below.
Things you can bold:
- the name of your employer (generally only if well known) or your job title (if it’s something you want to draw attention to); you typically wouldn’t want to bold the name of your employer and your title as they would wash each other out.
- the name of the college or university you attended.
- category headings for the different sections of your resume.
Things you definitely don’t need to bold:
- dates. I really can’t think of anyone who would want to draw attention to a date although one job seeker did argue with me because she wanted to leave perfect attendance in high school on her post-college resume that was already three pages long.
- your address (recruiters aren’t going to write you a letter and, if they do, trust me you don’t want it).
- anything that’s already capitalized, underlined, or italicized.
By using bold sparingly, you’ll find that recruiters will be more likely to focus on what it is you’re trying to highlight. And, after all, isn’t that the point?
I am working on revising my own resume, and I am wondering, how important is it for a senior undergrad to keep the resume to only one page? I’m trying to slice down on things, but I keep spilling over. I’ve cut out all of the high school experience and activities, but I have kept some high school accomplishments under my Honors section, which at the risk of sounding cocky, I do think were impressive (graduation speaker, National Honor Society). Time for that to go maybe? Or, is a one and a half page resume okay?
Great question. Typically, most undergrads should limit their resume to one page. It might seem daunting, but working mainly with MBAs who have on average five years of pre-MBA work experience, I can say it’s definitely possible.
The first place to look is formatting. Font size, margins, condensing your contact information to two lines instead of having your street address, city/state/zip, phone, and email all on separate lines are the first places I normally look when trying to save space.
A lot of job seekers also put category headings on their own separate line and then add a single space before starting with content for that section. I’d much rather see section headings on the left margin and content for each section starting on the same line as the appropriate heading.
Although your high school accomplishments are impressive, but I’m sorry to say I’d probably cut them now that you’re in college.
Page Lengths of Résumés
According to a survey conducted by Accountemps of 150 senior executives at the 1,000 largest
companies in the U.S. regarding the acceptable length of résumés revealed the following page length
statistics:
Staff Level Employees: 1997 73% had 1 page and 25% had 2 pages
2007 52% had 1 page and 44% had 2 pages
Executive Level Employees: 1997 28% had 1 page and 64% had 2 pages
2007 61% had 2 pages and 31% had 3 pages
I agree. A little bolding can be a tasteful and effective way to draw attention to something. Too much bolding makes you look like you have eyesight problems.
I leave resume revision to the experts.
That’s an excellent tip. Over doing it is just as bad as under doing it. The balance has to be maintained visually as well as in the information provided.
Most jobseekers depend upon expert resume writers which is a sensible thing to do. Such professionally prepared resumes stand a better chance of catching a recruiter’s attention.
But it is no more enough to catch attention
A resume must succeed in amazing any recruiter by being interactive .
In a resume, a recruiter should be able to find additional information about a candidate by
viewing analytical graphs rather than reading
clicking on knowledge , skill related keywords
clicking on Candidate Name, Birth date, City location
You will find this at CustomizeResume
I will appreciate suggestions for further improvements.
hemen parekh
@hemenparekh-Thanks for the comment. Including analytical graphs really depends on your audience as not all industries will be accustomed to seeing that information on the resume. Also, in the US, it’s usually never a good idea to include birth date due to possible age discrimination. At the end of the day, it’s really about your ability to show impact. Did you make a recommendation? If so, to whom? Was it adopted? Did it save time or money? If so, how much?