Quick Tip to align your resume to perfection

by Sridhar Jammalamadaka on March 7, 2010


Carefully look at both the images below. They are screenshots of a section Software skills an experienced IT programmer’s resume.

Image-1: Resume before alignment

without-alignment.jpg

Image-2: Resume after alignment

with-alignment.jpg

Did you notice any difference between the images, not in text but in alignment?

Which one looks better formatted? Obviously, Image-2 looks better.

Now tell me honestly didn’t you come across this kind of formatting problem while editing your resume in Microsoft Word? I’m sure you might have come across this problem and like everyone does you might have ignored it.

You no longer have to ignore this problem. I have a perfect solution to format your resume and make it look like Image-2. Here it goes. The mistake we commonly do while editing such sections is we use normal spaces to align the colons(:) in a single line. And we leave the default left alignment in that section of the resume.

What you should do instead, is to first change the alignment of the section from “Left” to “Justified”. And instead of using line spaces, use tab for spacing and try adjusting the colons(:) to fall in a straight vertical line. Bingo, you will have a perfectly formatted resume.

Try this yourself to get the aha feeling.


About the Author:  Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the Editor of Interview Mantra. He's a typically non-typical Software Engineer from Pune, India. He likes entrepreneurship, web technologies and Micro Controller programming. He enjoys playing cricket and piano (but rarely does these activities). Through this website, he wishes to gather a large community of aspiring engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals from all parts of the globe. You can connect with him on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sridhar.j


  • http://blog.maheshj.info The Practical Idealist

    Have never had any formatting problem with my resume (in fact, I had a positive comment from my manager about it at my first workplace). That is because I spent time learning how to use Word effective, and most people don’t seem to bother. Anyway, an even better alternative to getting rid of those alignment problems is to use a table, and after filling it up, getting rid of the grid-lines.

  • http://www.interviewmantra.net Sridhar

    @Practical Idealist,
    Yeah the key to a good resume is making it presentable and neat. People should spend time on it and keep it perfect. I think you did the right thing by learning to use Word effectively. It is so important to know Word, especially for editing important document such as resume etc. I personally don’t prefer using tables. As they trouble me with the formatting a lot at times. Also many search engines read the doc format resumes as ANSI text files. In such cases, the alignment would become a bit awkward after conversion.

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