Is your resume format costing you jobs?

There are three types of job candidates in this world: the kind who sling together a list of skills into a Word document written in boring Times New Roman; the kind who include infographics, word art, and shaded borders to stand out; and the little bears who get it just right. You might think your skills can speak for themselves and proper formatting is unnecessary. Wrong. An unformatted or under-formatted resume exudes carelessness and pigeonholes you as the kind of candidate who can never, ever, ever be assigned outward or upward facing communications. What, are you going to submit a treatment to a network that looks like it was written on scratch paper?!

It's just as bad if you oscillate the other way and showcase your graphic design talents or your excellent ability to use the design functions in Word that no one really understands. (Though, for design industries or art-related jobs, go for it, but maybe use Illustrator, not Word). Your resume isn’t your booth at the 7th grade science fair, adorned with a collaged poster to lure the judges over. It’s a professional document and should read like one -- organized, clean, and bolded/italicized/underlined minimally and consistently. Try reading your resume in under 30 seconds, the way a hiring manager would -- does all the information you want to make “pop” pop without giving you a headache? If not, you need to reformat.
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--Angela Silak & Cindy Kaplan