What Resume Writers Get Wrong About Formatting

The resume formatting industry has produced some genuinely terrible advice over the years. I have seen trend pieces recommending infographic resumes, resume websites, video introductions, and elaborate design templates that I would never send to a real employer if I were trying to get a job. I have also seen the opposite extreme — advice so focused on clean simplicity that it produces documents that are nearly unreadable in their spareness.

The truth about resume formatting is that it exists to serve communication, not to express creativity or to demonstrate thoroughness. Every formatting choice should be evaluated by a single question: does this make the important information easier to find and understand? If yes, keep it. If no, remove it.

"Your resume format should be invisible. The goal is for the reader to be thinking about your qualifications, not about your font choice or your color scheme. Anything that calls attention to itself is probably working against you."

The design template problem

Resume templates are everywhere, and many of them are actively harmful to the candidates who use them. The most beautiful templates — the ones with columns, color blocks, icons, progress bars for skills, and graphical headers — tend to be the worst performers in actual hiring processes for reasons I have explained in other contexts: ATS parsing, formatting complexity, the risk that visual flair substitutes for substantive content.

More subtly, elaborate templates can create an implicit argument that you want your resume to make: that you are creative, design-minded, and contemporary. This is genuinely useful if you are applying for creative or design roles. For most other roles, it introduces noise. The reader is now processing your visual choices as well as your professional history, and unless your visual choices are exceptional, they are unlikely to help you.

What good formatting actually looks like

Good resume formatting is characterized by a small number of consistent, purposeful choices. A single, clean typeface — one that is professional, legible, and appropriate to the industry. (Note: "appropriate to the industry" means different things in different contexts. A serif font reads as traditional and authoritative — appropriate for law or finance. A clean sans-serif reads as modern and efficient — appropriate for technology or consulting. Neither is universally right.)

Consistent spacing and alignment. The eye should be able to move through the document predictably, finding date ranges, job titles, and company names in the same relative position throughout. Inconsistent alignment forces the reader to search for information, which creates friction and reduces the document's scannability.

Appropriate use of bold and spacing to create hierarchy. Your name at the top in larger type. Section headings clearly distinguished from content. Job titles and companies in bold, dates in a muted position to the right. This hierarchy guides the scanning eye and ensures that the most important information — what you did and where you did it — is immediately findable.

The margins and white space question

One formatting choice that more people should make consciously is margin width. The instinct, when trying to fit content into a limited space, is to shrink margins. This is almost always the wrong decision. Narrow margins make a document feel crowded and stressful to read. Wider margins — 0.75 inches on the sides, at minimum — create breathing room that makes the document feel more organized and easier to engage with.

Similarly, adequate spacing between sections and between bullet points is worth more than the content you would have to remove to accommodate it. A well-spaced resume with ten excellent bullet points is more effective than a cramped resume with fifteen mediocre ones. Density is not a virtue in document design, and the impulse to fill every centimeter of page space is usually worth resisting.

The bullet point debate

Resume convention has settled on bullet points for experience descriptions, and there are good reasons for this: bullets are scannable, they separate individual achievements cleanly, and they force you to articulate each thing you did as a discrete, bounded claim rather than an undifferentiated paragraph. These are real advantages.

But bullets can be used poorly. Bullets that begin with "Responsible for..." have already lost the battle. Bullets that are incomplete sentences — fragments without subjects and clear verbs — are harder to process than complete, active-voice statements. Bullets that are too short to mean anything ("Improved processes." "Led meetings.") waste space. Bullets that are too long become paragraphs with decorative dots in front of them.

The right bullet point is a complete, active-voice statement that begins with a strong verb, describes what you did and ideally what resulted, and runs between one and three lines. That is the format that is easiest to read, most credible, and most ATS-friendly.

Simplicity as a strategic choice

I want to close with a principle that I think is undervalued in resume advice: simplicity is a signal. A clean, well-formatted, easy-to-read document communicates something about how you think and work — that you prioritize clarity over ornamentation, that you understand your audience, and that you can make good decisions about what to include and what to leave out. These are genuinely valuable professional qualities, and your resume can demonstrate them before a word of the content is read.

The candidates who think of their resume format as a communication choice rather than an aesthetic one are almost always better served by their documents than those who treat formatting as decoration.