Resume Style – Why Is It Important?
Personal and Professional Style and Your Resume
Your resume style reflects your own personal style, and the type of job that you’re looking for.
When it comes to searching for executive or professional jobs, a staid, conservative style is usually recommended.
You want light colored or white, heavy bond paper, with matching envelopes, which provide a professional look.
But what if you’re an art designer, or a graphic artist?
photo credit: zaphodsotherhead via flickr
Why not have fun with your resume, putting your own artwork or graphic design on the paper — something that will really make it stand out from the crowd?
But be sure this effort at resume style doesn’t distract too much from your resume content.
While illustrations on your resume paper are one thing, you do not want to be experimenting with different fonts or font sizes! Topic headers should be bold, not in such a fancy font that it’s unreadable.
Depending on the businesses you’re applying to, a little out-of-the-box thinking with resumes is not a bad thing. I’m not talking about falsifying the information on your resume, of course; I’m talking about the look of the resume. In businesses where personal style is all important, your resume style should reflect that.
Resume Style Samples
For sample resume styles, check out the many books written on the subject at your local library, or better still, go through all the hundreds of samples of various different styles on the web. Now we’re talking about a different style — the style in which you put your information on the page.
It used to be that resumes could only be one page long. This was drilled into everyone at business school and by career counselors. But that stricture has gone by the wayside. Now resumes of two or even three pages are not uncommon.
After all, if you’ve spent eight years in college and graduate school, or have been in the workforce for many years, you’re bound to have quite a few accomplishments in your chosen field for you to list. And depending on the amount of responsibility you’ve held at each of your places of employment, you’ll have lots of skills and accomplishments to list there as well.
