Everything that makes most professional resumes look professional can really be boiled down to three basic tools in your word processor. A familiarity with tables, lists, and stylized font can achieve a dynamically formatted resume that can be adjusted with ease. With the following tips about the usage of these devices, and some practice in playing around with their fancier options, you can construct a professional resume with minimal effort.

Tables

The table is the best way to organize your resume content in a neat and adaptable layout. From first-hand experience, I can tell you that the more you rely on tabs, spaces, and indenting tricks to separate your content, the more likely you are to find small but annoying errors in your final product, and the more frustrating it will be to modify. Tables especially yield themselves to the entry-level resume because the columns are the perfect way to position your section titles down the left hand side and time frames towards the right. In fact, once you pick up some basic skills in Microsoft Word, like how to create, delete, and merge table cells and adjust table options like alignment and margins, you can turn almost any layout imaginable into an easily adaptable template.

In the template we have provided, you’ll find we even use nested tables (tables within tables), which may appear messy with the borders visible in the Word 2003 environment, but provide for a cleaner, more professional appearance once printed (without borders). This brings me to an important point about tables in resumes: it is almost always more professional to print them with invisible borders. Your resume should not resemble a spreadsheet. It is just as much a presentation as it is an informative document, so think PowerPoint, not Excel.

Lists

Lists are engrained in the nature of the resume. In fact, a resume is just a big list of the reasons why you’re the best candidate for the position, arranged hierarchically in tables for easier reading. Naturally, your resume is bound to have several lists in it, so you should know the professional standards and psychological principles necessary to construct them in the best way possible.

Some of the most important lists on your resume will consist of items corresponding to time-frames. This includes your work history, activities and honors. Professional standards leave the ordering of these lists up to little interpretation. Reverse chronological order (most recent stuff first) is generally the proper format, simply because employers view your most recent endeavors as most indicative of your current priorities and abilities. Frankly, this is probably an accurate assumption. Indicate which positions/honors/activities you are still involved with by writing “present” in place of the end date, and in the case of overlapping time-frames, compare the items first by end date, then start date.

When constructing a time-based list, also remember to set apart the time frames from the event descriptions to make the general chronology easy to follow. Even though it is a less important resume feature at the entry-level stage because of the interference of school, continuity is something employers often look for, and you’ll want to make it clear that there were no long stretches of time when you were doing absolutely nothing. If you did have periods like this in recent years, only then might it be a good idea to not draw attention to time-frames by setting them apart. In fact, if you think this is a significant issue for you, it’s worth thinking about some of the alternative resume styles that we will present in articles to follow. Otherwise, usually a table with two columns is a clean way to list items and time-frames separately but in parallel, as we did in our sample resume.

Non time-based lists such as the skills section are where you have the freedom to list items in the order you feel is most advantageous. In case no clear order jumps out at you, I’ll share with you a useful tidbit that I picked up in an intro psychology course I took years ago, called the serial positioning effect. Basically, the serial positioning effect says that after someone reads a list, they are most likely to remember the first and last elements best. Memory retention gets gradually worse going towards the middle of the list from each end. Therefore, Eliot and I find it a good bet to begin and end our non time-based lists with the strongest items.

Bold/CAPITALIZED/Italicized Font

Besides the obvious organizational and aesthetic purposes for stylized font in a resume (e.g. subtitles in sections), it can also be used to draw special attention to some of the elements of your resume that could be considered strong points or particularly relevant to the position for which you’re applying. At a career fair my sophomore year, I handed an IBM representative what I thought was a strong, visually balanced resume, only to have her tell me that I was a fool not to have my GPA in bold. She explained that I shouldn’t try to be humble in my resume because she and I were both aware of its purpose. Knowing that there’s no better place to get resume advice than from someone that evaluates them for a living, I went home and put my GPA in bold font and have been getting positive responses ever since.

You don’t have to have a good GPA to merit bold font. One of my good friends is in his final couple semesters, so in a recent interview for an internship he handed the interviewer a resume in which he had decided to draw attention to his date of graduation. It apparently incited a positive comment from the interviewer, who was intrigued at the prospect of having a summer intern who would be available full-time by as early as the following winter.

It may even be something as small as an especially relevant course that you choose to draw attention to. Whatever it is, stylized font is a great space-saving alternative to setting something apart by isolating it on the page. Just remember not to overuse this technique. A resume with too much bolded information will make the rest of the content look unimportant, and as a result, it may never be read.

With the three core tools described here, you should be able to begin creating the meat of your resume. In our next article, we will wrap up our discussion on resume formatting with some final important details in keeping your resume up to professional standards.

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