So, you've got the contents sent, you've organized it effectively, and now you're ready to send it off, right?

Wrong. You still have one more choice: format.

As technology changes, so does the way applicatants deliver their résumés. You've got 3 choices:

• Traditional paper - design the layout carefully to maximize human readability:
  • Use high-quality (linen or cotton) paper
  • Choose a large-enough font size (at least 11 point)

  • Make sure you've got enough white space on the page - if the only way to fit everything onto one page is single-spaced, 10 point Times New Roman with quarter-inch margins all the way around, consider going to 2 pages.

• Scannable - as more and more large companies run résumés through a scanner and have it read by computer, applicants have to learn to design documents that can be easily read by a machine, not a person.

• On-line - the web comes even to the job world, so depending on your field, you may want to consider putting your résumé into HTML and putting it on-line. Here you need to think about a human reading a document on a machine - issues of browser compatibility, load time, and layout are critical.

Creating a Scannable Résumé-->