2011: Expert CV Tip of the Week 7
February 24, 2011 Leave a comment
The How to Make a CV Tip of the Week 7 is:
“Use a smaller overall font to make your CV content look tidier“
Another simple piece of CV advice this week. I would always advise using a slightly smaller CV font size. Using a smaller font size in your CV employs a number of benefits; 1) You fit more information in a smaller amount of space, thus allowing you to better ‘market’ and ‘sell’ yourself to employers with additional text and CV information, 2) The overall look of your CV will appear tidier, as text will be blocked up and pushed together tighter, 3) Your CV formatting will seem more professional due to efficient use of space, and 4) You can section off your resume in a better structured manner as you will have more CV space available ‘to play with’. It also has the added benefit of allowing you to use the space to incorporate various different designs for your curriculum vitae. Generally speaking, your CV should be 10-12 font size, so in accordance with the advice here I would say that size 10 in most cases will look better and be more suitable for your CV format.
You will always get people that might advise against and disagree with this expert CV tip of the week, and in some cases there are valid points. Negative points for example, include making sure the CV text font size is not too small that the average reader will struggle to make out the words! Plus in some cases people may not read thoroughly the CV text that too small, as they may be put off by the ‘bulkiness’ appearance of the curriculum vitae. With font size, it’s about making an educated judgement and generally speaking the benefits of having a slightly smaller overall text size outweigh the drawbacks as it’s unlikely that you will often find an employer for a job that will penalise you for font being too small.
The final point to make about CV font size when judging the format of your resume, is that you don’t want people to get the impression that you’ve padded out the space by using a LARGER FONT SIZE, because your curriculum vitae is likely to end up in the bin.