I recently received a resume and when I opened it up the formatting was a mess. This brought up the question….what the heck was this guy thinking?!

It seems that the format he chose was a template from one of the big companies and in email’s outer transport space….all formatting was lost. Why choose a template that can lose its formatting? Beats me? Matter of fact, I’d suggest keeping all your formatting within the document and not in a template with headers and footers. They get twisted, lost, can’t parse and that’s not good if you are looking to be found. I said to this guy laughingly, but kind of concerned….”you forgot to put your name on your resume”. He responded, no, it’s there.

Format fail!

He sent me a PDF and there it was, right at the top, but good thing I knew this guy, or I would have put his resume in the proverbial “circular file”. I’m anti PDF’s because they aren’t good for tracking and parsing purposes, but in this case it worked.

Choosing a format is a tough decision that really matters, so don’t take the formatting, and obviously the content, of your resume lightly.

If you have sent your resume to a company and haven’t received the response you feel you should have you can chock it up to the economy, but consider the fact that it could be your resume.