No matter how much experience you have, your resume should always be somewhere between one and two pages long. But if you’re just starting your career, or you’ve spent a lot of time in one particular job, then you may have a problem even filling one page.
It doesn’t look too impressive if the description of your entire career fits onto just a third of a page, even if you’re a graduating student with no experience. Follow these quick steps for filling out the page on a short resume.
More Introduction
One of the most flexible areas on a resume is its introduction. Those first few sections at the top, including an objective, summary, career highlights, and other overview material can easily be lengthened to fill out a resume. Be thankful that you have this problem. It allows you to go into much greater detail and market yourself much more aggressively than if you were forced to pare it down to the basics about your career.
Add a Headline
I recommend this technique every chance I can, because it works. It’s a great way to add focus and power to your resume. And for shorter resumes like yours, it has the extra benefit of easily taking up an extra half-inch or so of room by the time you put in the necessary returns above and below the headline. Make the headline a combination of where you’ve been and where you’d like to go. For example, if you’ve worked in warehouses and you want to move into logistics management, make your headline something like, “Accomplished Warehousing and Logistics Specialist.”
Wider Margins
If your resume’s text is still falling short, one of the first things to try is to adjust the page margins. You have plenty of room for adjustment in this regard before the document will look odd. Keep it somewhere between .5 and 1.25 inches and it’ll be fine.
That range of adjustment alone can make a huge difference in where the end of your text falls on the page.
Bullet Points Instead of Paragraphs
If your job description and accomplishment entries are short, consider summarizing each part and breaking the sentences into separate bullet points. Besides filling out the page better, this technique also has the added benefit of being much easier to read at a glance. That alone makes this trick worth considering even if you don’t need to fill up space.
Different Font
On resumes, you don’t really have much choice of fonts. Since most resumes are sent electronically now, you need to use fonts that are commonly carried by every computer. And that basically comes down to Arial and Times. But Arial tends to take up more room than Times, which can make a difference over a whole document. You can also experiment with changing font size. But don’t go too big. Twelve points is about as large as you want to go on a resume. And even that looks kind of huge, especially if it’s printed out. Stick with 10 or 11 point type. If that doesn’t work, try another trick.
Bigger Leading
Unlike font sizes, which don’t allow much margin for adjustment on a resume, the spacing (called “leading”) between lines of type can be adjusted considerably without the document looking bad. In fact, oftentimes adding more leading actually makes a resume look better, by allowing more breathing room around the type. Experiment with different settings and see what fills the space and looks best.
More Spacing Between Paragraphs
Often times you can also adjust the space between paragraphs and sections. Yes, at a certain point, the resume can look disjointed if there’s too much space between sections. But you have plenty of leeway in this aspect.
