Plain formatting that still looks like you tried
Okay you guys. Last lesson we talked about why the fancy templates break your résumé before a human ever sees it. Today's the follow-up question everybody asks right after: fine, no columns, no graphics, so what am I actually supposed to make instead?
Plain. But plain doesn't mean lazy. There's a difference between a document that looks stripped down because you didn't try, and one that looks clean because you made a hundred small good decisions. We're doing the second one.
Here's what that looks like at home, step by step.
Pick one font. One.
Something a computer already has. Calibri, Arial, Georgia if you want a little more character. Not two fonts for "visual interest," not a script font for your name at the top. One font, one size for your body text, one slightly bigger size for your headers. That's the whole system.
Name and contact info at the top, plain text
Your name, phone number, email, city and state. That's it. No little icon of a phone, no icon of an envelope. Those tiny graphics are exactly the kind of thing that confuses scanning software. You don't need a headshot. Nobody's hiring you off your photo and in a lot of cases a photo just gives someone a reason to filter you out before they've read a word, fair or not.
Headers that are just headers
"Experience." "Education." "Skills." Bold them if you want, maybe make them a point size bigger. Don't put them in a shaded box, don't underline them with a decorative line, don't center them with little dashes on either side. A header's job is to tell you where you are on the page. That's it.
Bullet points, left aligned, one column
This is the big one. No two-column layout with your skills in a sidebar and your experience in the main block. I know it looks organized. I know it looks like something a graphic designer made. But a lot of the systems companies use to scan résumés read left to right, top to bottom, and when you've got two columns it reads across both of them like one garbled sentence. Your skills section ends up mashed into the middle of your job description and the computer just gives up on the whole thing.
One column. Top to bottom. Boring to look at, easy to read, easy to scan.
White space is doing work
Leave margins. Leave a little space between sections. A résumé crammed edge to edge with tiny text looks like you're hiding something or trying to fit ten years of stuff onto one page that should've been cut anyway — we've covered that one. Space isn't wasted room. It's what makes a tired hiring manager's eyes able to find the next thing.
Save it as a plain PDF, name it like a person will open it
"Firstname_Lastname_Resume.pdf." Not "Resume_final_v3_USE THIS ONE.pdf." I've seen it. We've all seen it.
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Now. My daughter Brynn, she's sixteen, watched me fill out a job application at the kitchen table a while back. She read over my shoulder and asked why I was lying about liking teamwork, because in her world if you say something on paper it better be strictly, literally true or it's a lie. I told her I wasn't lying, I was translating. There's a difference between dressing something up so it's not true anymore, and saying a true thing in the language the other person actually speaks. Formatting is the same deal. You're not making it fancy to trick anyone. You're making it readable so the true, good stuff about you actually lands. Then I sat down and built her a starter résumé for babysitting and yard work jobs, because at sixteen you should have one ready before you need it, not after.
That's the whole point of plain formatting. It's not about being humble or unambitious on the page. It's translation, same as the bullet points, same as the gap sentence, same as everything else we've done in this class. You're taking what's true about you and putting it in a shape the system and the human on the other end can both actually receive.
Honestly, I can't help you much past this. Fonts and spacing and whether something "looks nice" — that's not my eye, never has been. What I can tell you is this: plain and clean beats pretty every time it's been tested against an actual applicant tracking system. I'd rather you have an ugly résumé that gets read than a beautiful one that gets thrown out before a person ever sees it. It's yours to decide, but that's where I land.
Before next time
Open your résumé and count your columns. If you've got more than one, that's your homework — flatten it into a single column before we meet again.