A hiring manager sees an average of 75 resumes for each job opening. With 75 other contenders vying for the same position, even the tiniest of errors can become red flags… this is why details matter.
REVISE, REVISE, REVISE
The revision process is by far the most important part of updating your resume. After moving items around as well as adding new experience and details to your resume, don’t forget to review the resume before you send it out. The process of updating your resume is bound to create a few new typos that weren’t there before. We suggest these three simple revision steps: walk away, read backwards from bottom to top, and hand it over.
Always Send Your Resume As a PDF
Stay away from sending your resume as a Word document. Instead, always send your resume as a PDF. Here’s why: Software updates occur at least once a year, which usually renders older versions of the software obsolete. Let’s say that you wrote your resume in Word 2013. You saved the document as a .docx and you sent it to the hiring manager who was still running Word 2007 (she really needs to update her software, but that’s not the point here). When she opened the file, “resume.docx", it was opened in Word 2007, and its format did not match the design you poured so much effort into creating using Word 2013. The spaces might be smaller, or larger. The symmetry of your resume might be skewed. Even the font style, size and color could be different. All those hours of meticulously making sure that your resume had the perfect amount of white space, were thwarted by the hiring manager’s ancient word processor. For those reasons — and several others — you should always send your resume as a PDF. A PDF, or Portable Document Format, is essentially a universally viewable file. Therefore, the PDF file of your resume that you submit with your job application will always look like the resume you designed in the first place.
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