Fonts and Formats for your Resume

What fonts and formats you use for your resume can make quite a difference to how it is received.

Your resume is a business document and should be written as such. So use a "business" font. Times New Roman or Arial are both accepted business fonts, and if you stick to either of these you will be fine.

10 to 12 point font size is good. If your resume is rather brief for whatever reason, then 12 point will fill the page up better. If you have more to put in than you can easily fit, use a 10, or 10.5 font. Normally, I use an 11 point font.

Times New Roman is known as a "serif" font, and the serifs are the little lines at the bottom and tops of the lines in the font. Arial is known as a "sans serif" font, which means without serifs, becuase it does not have these little lines, and capital "I" for example, in Arial, is just a straight stick line with no extras.

Which you choose is mostly a matter of choice, although if you will be faxing your resume much, the clean lines of the Arial font tends to come out clearer at the other end.

If you wish you may have your heading within your resume in the which ever font you did not choose for the rest of the text. Personally, I don't like this, since when I go back to edit the resume to target it for another position, the change of fonts tends to get mixed up and I end up having to format the entire resume again for the appropriate fonts in the appropriate places. However, when done properly, it looks just fine.

No more than 2 fonts through, per resume. And make all your bullets the same. It does no make some stand out more if you choose one type of bullet for the highlights and another for the other bullets further down. It is merely distracting and fussy.

So keep your creativity for the words you put in your resume, and let the format be simple, clean and professional.

And of course, what goes for the resume, goes for the cover letter as well.

Need more help with resumes and cover letters?
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