Resume Design

Giving the resume design the finishing touch

A resume can be considered to be the first major step to enter in to the universal rate race which marks the contemporary job market all across the globe. If the entire procedure of recruitment of a fresh staff in to any organization is considered, it can be observed that the whole method is marked by fierce competition and the candidate has to go through all sorts of assessments and scrutinizes before landing up with the job.

Thus it can be easily understood the difficulties as well as the importance of the first break which usually comes with the call for interview and to ensure it the most important thing one needs to have is a well prepared resume.

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Contrary to the traditional idea of a record of academic and vocational backgrounds and accomplishments along with a set of essential personal details, a resume is in fact more like a precise and target specific advertisement where the candidate sells his skills and qualities to his or her prospective employers. Although there are as such nothing like a universally accepted official format for a resume, a critical thought or two about its purpose can often shed a light on a few points which can act as essential guidelines to make one's resume not only just better to look at but also far more effective in its purpose. For instance, one of the most significant things to be kept in mind while preparing a resume is the fact that in case of a job vacancy the number of resumes submitted to the HR department can go up to thousands in numbers.

Hence, the employers can not really concentrate on the resumes separately for more than half a minute before deciding whom to call for the interview and who all should be left out. So taking this factor in to account, the resume should not only be just written but even designed in such a way that it succeeds in creating a positive impression even in less than a minute.

There are in fact quite a number of reasons underlying the importance of resume design. While it is most certainly crucial to have the facts and figures related to the academic career, the record of past work experiences along with the set of important personal information, but one must realized that in order to stand out in a whole stack of resumes of people who have similar backgrounds, qualifications and accomplishments and to get individualized from being just a name on a paper, one must also pay attention to the question of how the facts and figures are presented. It is precisely at this point that the significance of resume design sets in.

Generally the task of designing a resume is kept for the last after every other thing associated with preparing the resume is being done and over with. Being an out and out creative exercise, there is no such clear cut guidelines available about designing a resume though there are of course certain points keeping which in mind one can at least feel more confident about staying ahead in the race if not anything else.

To begin with one must remember that the key to a successful resume design lies in the understanding and reading of the resume from the perspective of the employer or any third person reader and not on his or her own. Thus taking into account a few of the reading habits such as the standard being from left to right and from top to bottom, one can arrange the information on his or her resume in such a way that despite having similar content, it will show up even in a stack. An effective way to do this is to put forward the relevant information and using suitable fonts so that when the resume is printed out, the fact are distributed all over the page in such a way that if it is divided into four equal quadrant like parts, there will be equal amount of information and blank space in each one of them making the whole thing balanced and thus more pleasing to the eye.

The balance in the page will automatically urge the employer to pay more attention to that particular resume rather than the other ones. Balance can be done in a resume in other ways as well such as putting down the information and all the pertinent facts and figures in rows and columns of measured magnitudes and using the appropriate fonts of correct size besides using bullet points wherever applicable, etc. It is always recommended to ask someone else to go through it after the resume design before submitting it to confirm about its effectiveness.