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Fonts
by
ResumeEdge.com - The
Net's Premier Resume Writing and Editing Service
Use popular fonts that are not overly decorative
in order to ensure optimum scannability.
This sentence is typeset in a decorative font that is
known to cause problems with resume scannability
(Script).
This font is also a problem for scanners because of its
unconventional shapes (Caligrapher).
Following are some samples of good fonts for a
scannable resume:
Serif Fonts
(traditional fonts with little "feet" on the edges of the letters)
Bookman -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Garamond -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
New Century Schoolbook -- The quick brown fox jumps
over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Palatino -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Times Roman -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Sans Serif Fonts
(contemporary fonts with no decorative "feet")
Arial The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy
dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Arial Narrow The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Tahoma -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
Helvetica -- The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog
THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER A LAZY DOG
It doesn't make any difference whether you choose
a serif or a sans serif font, but the font size should be no smaller than 9 points and no larger than
12 points for the text. Having said that, you will notice that the fonts in the examples above are all
slightly different in size even though they are exactly the same point size (10 point). Every font has
its own designer and its own personality, which means that no two typefaces are exactly the same.
The key to choosing a font for a scannable resume
is that none of the letters touch one another at any time. This can be caused by poor font design, by
adjusting the kerning (the spacing between letters) in your word processor, or by printing your resume
with a low-quality printer (i.e., some dot matrix printers). Even some inkjet printers can cause the
ink to run together between letters with the wrong kind of paper.
Any time one letter touches another, a scanner
will have a difficult time distinguishing the shapes of the letters and you will end up with
misspellings on your resume. A keyword search looks for words that are spelled correctly, so a
misspelled word is as good as no word.
This is the same reason you don't want to use
underlining on your resume. Underlines touch the descenders on letters like g, j, p, q, and y and make
it difficult for an OCR program to interpret their shapes. Take a look at these words and see if you
can tell where a scanner would have trouble:
Related to fonts are bullets--special characters
used at the beginning of indented short sentences to call attention to individual items on a resume.
These characters should be solid for a scannable resume. Scanners interpret hollow bullets as the
letter "o." Avoid any unusually shaped bullets that a scanner might interpret as a letter.
While we are on the topic of special characters,
the % and & signs in some fonts cause problems for OCR software because they look like letters of the
alphabet, so always spell out the words percent and and. Foreign accents and letters that are not part
of the English alphabet will also be misinterpreted by optical character recognition.
Even though you have probably heard that italics
are a no-no on a scannable resume, today's more sophisticated optical character recognition software
can usually read italics without difficulty (provided the letters don't touch one another!). The
experts at Resumix and SmartSearch2 all state that their software has no problem reading italics, and
my staff has confirmed that with tests. We have even scanned resumes typeset in all italics without a
problem, although I don't recommend serif italics simply from a readability standpoint. The exception,
of course, are those italic fonts where one letter touches another. The key is to choose a font that is
easy to read and not overly decorative.
From Designing the
Perfect Resume, by Pat Criscito.
Copyright 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Barron's Educational Series, Inc.
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