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This article is sponsored by Resume Rabbit and TaxACT.

Are you Sabotaging your Job Search?

By Kevin Donlin

Are you sabotaging your job search?

You may be -- right now -- if your resume contains serious flaws in design, like the kind I see every day.

Here are five of the most-common design flaws I've found in the nearly 6,000 resumes people have sent me to review since 1995. Avoid them and prosper!

1. Dense text: Nothing slows a busy reader faster than sections of text that go on and on ... and on. I try to limit all paragraphs in a resume to three or four lines at most. You can improve the readability of your resume by using bullet points throughout, to break up text-heavy sections. This will make it easier to read, and thus, much more effective.
   
   
2. The "ransom note" effect: I've seen resumes with five or more different fonts and sizes, making them look as though they'd been pasted together with letters cut from a magazine. To avoid distracting readers, limit yourself to two fonts in your resume -- three at most.
   
   
3. Tiny type: If you need miniscule letters to fit the text of your resume onto one or two pages, you're hurting your chances. A font smaller than 11 points will cause most readers to do one of three things: squint, look for a magnifying glass, or pitch the offending resume. All bad. I use 12- or 11-point Times Roman or Garamond fonts for resume body copy. You should consider doing likewise.
   
   
4. All capital letters: LIKEWISE, ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ARE PROVEN BY YEARS OF RESEARCH TO BE HARDER TO READ THAN STANDARD CAPITALIZATION. WHY HANDICAP YOURSELF?
   
   
5. The "trash compactor" effect: Too many folks try to cram too many words into each page. The jam-packed resume that results will look unprofessional. Try to leave a margin of at least 0.5" along the top and bottom, and 0.9" on the sides. A two-page resume is perfectly acceptable in many cases, so feel free to use more than one page if you just can't cut the content.

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