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Formatting your resume or CV is just as important for your candidacy as the words you use to describe your qualifications. The most common advice is to use bullet points. But effective formatting is not as simple as indiscriminately adding bullet points to your resume as if you were salting a dish.
Your formatting must match the readers’ tastes, diet, and expectations. There’s no one recipe to follow because the job description and your corresponding experiences always require different ingredients, but there are basic rules to follow when seasoning your resume/CV with formatting.
What Is Formatting?
Formatting is when you change the appearance of text to improve readability, add emphasis, or create a certain design aesthetic. It includes everything from underlining, bolding, italicizing, and capitalizing, to other text manipulations, such as changing font styles or sizes.
According to Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink, authors of “Writing for Busy Readers,” formatting serves two main purposes:
- It conveys meaning over and above the meaning of the words themselves. If you wrote your boss an email saying that you are “working” and used all caps, she would think you are shouting, and italics could either mean you are adding emphasis or you are being ironic and not working at all.
- It helps capture readers’ attention by making certain words stand out against the others. The subheadline “What Is Formatting?” helps the reader know what this section is about. If there wasn’t a subheadline, and you read the headline “Three Rules for Formatting Your Resume or CV” before skimming to this numbered section, you might be wondering: “These aren’t THE RULES?” This example shows how good formatting can be misleading, especially if you think that the bolded and underlined words to start this sentence are a link.
Formatting Your Resume/CV
Rogers and Lasky-Fink didn’t write their book exclusively for resume and CV writers, but the readers of application materials are among the busiest readers and chronic skimmers. A Ladders, Inc., eye-tracking study found that recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on the initial screening of a candidate’s resume. But the attention your resume or CV receives can depend on many factors, such as the number of other applicants, the type of position, and the expectations and preferences of the search committee.
In addition to using bullet points, it’s important to format your resume or CV with predictable sections marked by clear headers that are standard for your discipline or position type. For example, a faculty CV might have sections for Education, Work Experience, Research Experience, Publications, Teaching Experience, Grants & Awards, Memberships, Honors, and Technical Skills, whereas an administrative role might be simpler with Work Experience and Technical Skills, with Education at the end.
For more advice on resume and CV writing, including proper spacing and font types and sizes, read previous HigherEdJobs articles “Crash Course for Writing Your Resume or CV” and “10 Do’s and 10 Don’ts of Resume and CV Writing.”
This article concentrates on three basic rules around formatting, inspired by Rogers and Lasky-Fink but changed slightly to explain them through the lens of resume and CV writing.
Rule 1: Match Formatting to Readers’ Expectations
According to Rogers and Lasky-Fink’s research, a vast majority of people interpret that bolded, underlined, and highlighted text indicates things that the writer believes are most important.
Because of resume/CV parsing, where text is extracted from a document and into an applicant tracking system, your italicized words or words in different font colors or highlights might not transfer. Capitalization, especially within a sentence instead of a header, could be conveyed as anger instead of importance.
That leaves bullet points. Whereas a few bulleted items in narrative prose would indicate importance, resumes and CVs are different. Readers expect to see bullets throughout. Still, bullet point selection must follow a logical hierarchy, especially when using subbullets, which are bullets that are indented and nested under higher-level bullets. For example, you should use subbullets when describing the outcomes of a project or committee introduced in a preceding bullet.
Rule 2: Format the Most Important Ideas with Subbullets
Since nearly everything is bulleted on a resume/CV, you can use subbullets to signal importance. When mentioning a class you taught, you might choose to leave the topics separated by commas in a series within one bullet instead of breaking them down into subbullets. You shouldn’t format the topics if they are shorter or the class is not as important as the project or committee work listed elsewhere with subbullets.
Rule 3: Limit Your Formatting Beyond Bullets
Formatting increases the likelihood that readers will read the formatted words or the first few words of a bulleted sentence, but they can decrease the reading of everything else.
There are tradeoffs to selecting what to format, not just with subbullets. You might choose to roll a minor grant or a secondary technical skill into a bullet within the Work Experience section instead of a separate section for Grants and Awards or Technical Skills. This could dilute the stronger aspects of your candidacy and call attention to a potential weakness if there’s not enough supporting evidence for that section.
As with words, more is not always better when it comes to formatting. Remember:
- Know your audience. The person screening your resume or CV might give it seven seconds and they expect to see bullet points and capitalized section headers.
- Make it obvious what you want them to see by starting bullets with the most important ideas and supporting them with subbullets.
- Too much formatting can be distracting and diminish your key points.
Formatting a resume or CV is not about doing what you’re “supposed” to do, or making your document look good. It’s about being an effective communicator. Format to convince a busy reader that you’re the best candidate for the job.
