White Space

This seems to be the time of year when a lot of people update their resumes, perhaps this year in particular.

Do not underestimate the value of white space in making your resume more readable.

Sometimes people seem to want to cram everything they have every done in their entire life onto their resume, often in big thick blocks of text that are nearly impenetrable. When you look at dozens of resumes each day like I do, trying to pluck out what is important from what is not important on such a resume is rather tedious.

That is where white space helps. It gives breathing room and legibility to your resume. It allows the reader to read, instead of making them strain through your thorny thicket of words. It may force you to edit, to prune out the unnecessary information to keep your resume a reasonable length. For reasons like these, white space is an essential element in highlighting your accomplishments.

Chose the accomplishments that you are most proud of, ones that you can substantiate, the ones that have made a difference. Set them apart with a little space all around. Use a few bullets. It gives your accomplishments the chance to be been seen and understood. And it is a lot easier on my eyeballs.