In this article series, we’re talking about resume formatting. We will also discuss how you can speed up this process through an automated resume formatting tool, like iReformat.
If you are not aware, iReformat is the market’s number one automated resume formatting tool. You can use iReformat to standardize a resume from the web app, office app or from your ios app. Even better, resumes are formatted in less than 30 seconds.
What is Resume Formatting?
Resume formatting is a process of standardizing resumes to your company’s preferences and needs. With our experience formatting thousands of resumes and working with various clients, here are the things we’ve noticed client request and do.
- Font Standardization – The top basic formatting change used by most everyone. This involves changing the font style, font type and font size. This is the easiest of all the changes you will do on the resume. If you have experience with resume formatting, you should probably be able to do this in a few seconds.
- Removing Contact Information – This is another change most companies do. This involves removing all contact information, like email address, phone number and address. This ensures that the client does not bypass you to contact the candidate directly, which important for staffing agencies. However, we’ve also seen some companies request the candidate email address and phone number remain on resumes. Even if the candidate contact information is present on the resume, the display of this information on the resume is standardized.
- Standardizing Candidate Name – You will get resumes with the names in all different formats For Eg: last name then first name; first name then last name, and more. Companies usually request this to be standardized. The most popular format is first name then last name.
- Standardizing Footer – This will involve either adding or removing the footer. Some companies want to remove the footer completely, others have their own content that they want displayed. We have built 2 line footers with addresses, and have even embed images. The most common foot information is the page number, followed by the candidate name.
- Standardizing Document Header – This will involve adding or modifying the header. Every company does this, since this is the area where they display the contact information. Some of the changes that usually are done in the header are:
- Adding a logo
- Adding recruiter name
- Adding recruiter phone number and or email address
- Removing candidate contact information
- Standardizing the display format of candidate name
- Adding company contact information
- Removing any images
- Header in all pages, first page, even pages or odd pages
- Standardizing Bullets – This is another common change. All bullets are usually changed to the standard company format. The company can have different bullet styles for the different bullet levels. Depending on the resume, this can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. We have seen some resumes where the candidate has typed in non-bullet characters, this takes a lot of time to manually correct.
- Customize Section Headers – This is another change some of companies do. Here are a few examples that are part of these changes:
- Standardize document section headers like objective, summary… to be either all capital or title case. This will also include standardizing the font settings. This could mean even a different font style, font size, font type or format like bold, italic and underline for the headers.
- Standardize job titles. This usually means changing the font style, size, type or format.
- Standardize company names – Similarly font and format styles are standardized by companies.
- Adjust Margin Settings – Companies usually have a standard margin setting they will be using for their , and this is something that can be changed quickly too.
- Remove Unwanted Spaces – This is done by most companies to make the resume presentation better. This can be removing spaces between paragraphs, bullets and removing blank pages.
- Standardize Dates – We have seen dates come in more than 150 formats so far. Most companies prefer to standardize this to a standard format and align it to the right side of the resume. This is very important for a lot of companies, this will also enhance the look of the resume greatly. It is also easier for the hiring manager to read the dates of employment.
- Setup Tables – This can involve setting the table width, cell content alignment, adding or removing borders. This can get really tricky, since resumes with tables are almost always harder to format. This can add a lot of extra time to format the resume, depending on how the tables are used.
- Remove Formatting – This means removing either bold, italic or underline throughout the resume. Any combination of these can be applied one of them, two of the combination or all of them.
- Watermarks – Some companies prefer to add a watermark for branding purposes.
- Removing Colors – Most companies want to remove any background colors, standardize the font colors throughout the resume.
After all these presentation changes, the recruiter then runs the spelling and grammar checks to make sure it all looks good.
These are all the requests we have received from our various clients. You may do some of it or all of it. Depending on how much of it you do, the time will increase proportionately.
Now that you understand what is involved, do you think in this day and age you should be manually formatting resumes. Also do you think all your recruiters will religiously follow your company standards to format the resume like the way you want. To be honest, that is not possible. The recruiters are so busy with sourcing resumes, talking to candidates and hiring managers. It is hard for them to pay attention to every formatting detail.
iReformat is the perfect Automated Resume Formatting Tool
Once your custom resume templates are created in iReformat. You can select a resume, pick a resume template and format a resume within 15 seconds. You can use our resume formatting tool from within word with our Office App. If you want to format a resume on the go, you can also use our iOS App. Sign up for a Free Trial of iReformat today, if you no longer wish to format resumes manually.
Additional reads:
Related guides:
How to update/add your logo on the resume template
How to create/update a resume template