HR Professionals read thousands of items a week, if not more

You must make your resume easy to read or your audience may just throw it away. Also know that many recruiters are over the age of 50, when eyes find it harder to read small and low contrast text no matter how cool it may look.

• Use high contrast and larger fonts (no smaller than 10 point)
• You can shrink the margins to squeeze in more words, but tiny margins are not as pleasing to eye for anyone, especially somebody trying to read 50 resumes before lunch.

The human resources (HR) recruiter is the first person to read your resume and they don’t understand most of the engineering speak, tools, techniques or projects. Recruiters and resume scanning bots scan documents for keywords that they are looking for and making sure they are there.

Make Information Easy To Find

The Recruiter must be able to find your work experience or education in seconds.

So it’s important to divide your resume into sections that are visually distinct. Recruiters must find what they need within seconds or your resume will be filtered out of the application pool.

Some recommendations for resume sections:

• Work Experience
• Education
• Relevant Special Skills
• Volunteer Experience
• Hobbies or Personal Projects

Only create sections that show you in your best light. For example, remove the hobbies section if you don’t have hobbies that show skills relevant to the job you are applying to.