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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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