How to Achieve the Perfect Resume Design

Your resume will be your best way to market yourself to a company. A resume is designed to tell your story in a way that makes a prospective employee want to see and meet you. The job market has never been more competitive, and so you need a well-designed resume to stand out from everyone else and showcase to employers that you have something they need. By making a few changes, you can take your resume to the next level and improve your chances of getting a job. Here is how to achieve the perfect resume design:

The Design is Important

No one has a black-and-white professional life, and so your resume need to reflect how unique you are. As you look within, highlight the unique selling point that makes you special. Use colors and emphasize important parts to make it easy for the reader to skim through your resume.

While we try to pretend looks aren’t important, they are when it comes to resumes. Hiring managers and recruiters look through dozens, if not hundreds, of resumes. If they can’t read your resume or it’s messy and cluttered, they will never get through it, no matter your experience or qualifications.

Tips To Improve Your Resumes Visuals

Add color: Adding color to your resume is a great way to make it stand out and draw attention to important elements. You can add color to your resume by using a colored border around the page, adding a colored heading to each section, or choosing a colored font to highlight sections of your resume. You can also use tables or graphs to add color to the document. For example, if you have a section on skills, you could create a graph to show your proficiency in each skill. Just be sure to keep the colors professional and tasteful, as too much color can be distracting.
Use legible fonts: Use font size around 10-12pt. The size depends of the font used. Make the headings such as Work History, Education and Skills a little bigger. Emphasize important parts of the text by making them bold or italic. Consider making the title and company on your work history bold as well as the start and end dates.
Use proper margins: This is a small tip but makes the overall look lot more cleaner than if the text would be running too close to the edges. Setting up margins for a resume document is simple and easy to do! First, open your document in Word. Next, navigate to the “Page Layout” or “Layout” tab. Here, you should be able to find the margin settings for your document. Generally, it is recommended to use one-inch margins for your resume document, but feel free to adjust them to your liking. Once you have set your desired margins, be sure to save your document.

There’s no need to be a designer to create a well-designed resume. What’s great about our modern world is that there’s a wealth of resume templates that’ll make it easy to accomplish the perfect resume design.

Use Bullet Points for Your Work History

When we say bullet points, we mean it. Don’t include a paragraph for every position on the resume. Everyone is dealing with limited time, so breaking things down into bullet points is a great way to let a potential employer see what you offer. Don’t make things harder than they have to be. Stick to bullet points.

As for what you need to be saying with those bullet points, a resume is a chance to tell your story, and every good story needs some action. Everyone applying for the job can do the same things you can, like managing customer service, but were they able to find a way to boost productivity and customer satisfaction?

Use bullet points to focus on accomplishments and showcase how you brought about positive changes for your old employers. Start each bullet point with an action verb.

Send Your Resume as a PDF File

This is one of the most overlooked things, despite being so simple to do. As lovely as your resume looks in Microsoft Word, different people have different fonts and settings on their computers. This definitely applies if using a designed template like we suggested before. Sending Word documents can cause the resume to break and potentially make a resume longer than it needs to be. Avoid all of these problems by simply choosing “Save As” and then “PDF”. It’s also recommended that the file name be your own name, such as firstname-lastname-resume.pdf

Include a Matching Cover Letter

It’s important to write and include a cover letter even if you think no one is going to read it. People that read the cover letter are the people that are genuinely interested in what it says. A cover letter could be what lands you the job as it reiterates all the important details from a resume and lets you take a more personal tone. Taking the time to write and include a cover letter also sends a positive message about your approach to applying for jobs. Your cover letter should match your resume styling.

How to Get the Perfect Resume Design?

You can save yourself some trouble and use a free resume template. Resume templates have all the sections you need and will help you achieve the perfect resume design. All you have to do is select the style that is right for the position you are applying to and fill in your information. Easy as that!