Most of the jobs I’ve been applying for have allowed me to email my resume. Many also accept resumes by fax. At least for the positions I am applying for, a committee makes the decisions and each person will have a photcopy. So at least 95% of the time, the person reviewing my resume will be reading it on ordinary copier paper. Why should I spend money to buy fancy paper for those rare occasions that someone is looking at the original? I also have to send fairly lenghty writing samples with my applications - are those supposed to be on fancy paper too? All things being equal, I would use the nice paper, as the resume experts recommend, but all things are not equal, since it’s a pain to buy and use when you’re on a public printer. In the real world, is there any chance that the paper I use will affect my chances of getting the job at all?
I’m currently searching for a new software developer. The candidates send their resumes to HR who then forward them to me. If they are sent via email, they are forwarded via email. If they are sent as a hard copy, they are scanned in and sent to me via email. In short, I don’t even see the paper.
But that is only a sample of one. I would be interested in hearing what the rest say.
Speaking as the guy who does pre-interview screening for the local office of my (oilfield services) employer, I much prefer well-formatted E-mailed resumes. For the printed variety, I don’t personally care what sort of paper it’s printed on; all I’m looking for is relevant experience and/or education, coherence and basic grammar/spelling skills.
In fact, these days when I receive a printed or faxed resume, I have to wonder why the person didn’t send it by E-mail, as the jobs we offer tend to require basic computer skills anyway.
Well, I don’t read resumes. But I recently have sent about a dozen out to various places looking for a summer internship. All but two were sent snail mail, and for both of those I used the fancy paper.
Sadly, I have since gotten rejected (or simply ignored) by all, so I guess it’s back to summer camp for me. But that’s a rant for another day…
When I first read your thread, I thought you meant “fancy” paper that was pink, or had cute pictures of kittens on it. That would be a REAL bad thing!
I used to be in a position where I would get dozens of resumes every day. Anything other than plain paper, or a nice bond paper, was pretty much put in the “never call them” stack.
It doesn’t hurt to have a few copies on better quality paper. You should always bring along extra copies for your interview, in case the original you sent (or emailed) is not readily available. A nicer bond paper copy wouldn’t hurt in that situation.
Also, you sometimes meet friends of friends who need a copy of your resume to take to another friend of a friend, or their boss, or human resources. Again, that copy could be on better paper, but it isn’t all that necessary.
I agree that most people prefer to get an email resume they will then print out on the cheapest paper they have in their printer.
Content is always the most important part of a resume…unless, of course, you were going to pull out that pink paper with the cute pictures of kittens on it…and then it wouldn’t matter if you had an MBA from Harvard - you would then be at the bottom of any pile.
OH…and PLEASE do not put your hobbies at the bottom of the page, unless maybe you are applying for work at a hobby/craft store.
Well, the examples of resumes for Yale Law School all include hobbies (“interests”). You’d think such an elite / elitist school would know a thing or two about professional resumes. Personally, I agree with you. Especially since my hobby of drinking whiskey in dive bars seems inappropriate to include.
I’ve seen one paper resume in five years, and I emailed the applicant to ask him to email the resume. In big companies, the resumes go into a searchable database. A paper one will get scanned in, but there is a good chance the formatting will get lost. I’ve seen scanned resumes that were such a mess that it is doubtful that anyone would ever read them unless there was some real draw.
If you are applying to some mom and pop operation, I could see how paper would be better. You could call up HR and ask.
It is one thing to mention you are the Illinois Chairperson of the Special Olympics, you spend your weekends teaching ESL to political refuges, you were recently elected President of the Jaycees and you helped Jimmy Carter build a few homes in Georgia. My guess is those “interests” would help in getting a good job.
It is quite another to put down that you like to watch television and enjoy dressing up as Star Wars characters and going to Star Wars conventions (both of which I have actually seen on resumes).
And I seriously doubt that many future employers really care if you are a good gardener, like to snowboard and play bagpipes. You might luck out and find a potential boss who shares the same interest, but for the most part - leave those little surprises for table talk at the Christmas party.
That’s exactly the sorts of things of talking about, DMark! These are the examples (two to three per resume): marathon running, racquetball, golf, hot-air ballooning, soccer, jazz saxophone, backpacking in the national parks (makes me wonder - only parks that are part of the national park system?), scuba diving, song writing, cooking, sailing, fishing, camping, hiking, cycling, basketball, waterskiiing, and tournament bridge.
I once overheard a manager in my industry who did a LOT of hiring admit that he had rejected a candidate once he found out one of the guy’s hobbies was competing in Ironman triathalons. The manager figured the guy would spend too much time training to put in the kind of hours the manager expected of his employees.
My experience has been the same as Khadaji’s. Any resumes I get have gone through HR first so they are never on the original paper anyway. We get a lot from Monster.com and the formatting is always a mess with those.
It seems to me that the thing that matters about resume formating is not the paper it is on but that it photocopy well, not just when carefully done on the nice copier down at kinkos but when done by a sixteen year old part time HR intern who doesn’t even look at it when he runs it off on the wheezing, leaky, low-on-toner, contrast-screwed up, misaligned hunk of junk down in HR, and that it in fact will copy well for a couple of generations in such hands on such a machine.
I have no idea how you test for such formating except to make sure that margins don’t matter too much and to perhaps make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and see what you get.
IANA HR specialist, but I’ve been involved in hiring people for a dozen years, so I see a number (hundreds, but not thousands) of resumes. I’ve hired a number of entry level positions, where the resume is that much more important.
I second DMark’s comments. If you go in person, then a nice bond is OK. Just don’t have the cheapest paper.
Please, NO mistakes on a resume. If you can’t get a resume right, you won’t get anything right.
The danger of including hobbies is that they can actually hurt you. If someone’s hobbies are all outdoors, I would hesitate to hire them for a job in Tokyo. Likewise if you are applying for a job in the oil fields, then mentioning your season pass to the opera may get you bumped.
If you “are the Illinois Chairperson of the Special Olympics, you spend your weekends teaching ESL to political refuges, you were recently elected President of the Jaycees and you helped Jimmy Carter build a few homes in Georgia” then put those as Community Service not hobbies. Everyone knows that you would rather be out “drinking whiskey in dive bars.”
Personal pet peeve. I may or may not call past job references for entry level jobs, but I always tell interviewees that I would like to call their supervisor at the volunteer ESL work they did. You should see the expressions of panic. Amazing the number of supervisors who are no longer there.
I wish I could find the idjit who started telling bright young job-seekers to put their résumés on fancy paper. I’d stuff the fancy paper down the idjit’s throat!*
Why? Because they photocopy like crap, that’s why, and then you can’t read the text, which defeats the point of the exercise. I want to find out about the applicant, not admire the fancy paper. I hope I’ve never missed a good applicant because of the difficulty of reading his/her résumé, but I can’t guarantee it.
By way of background, my employer is low-tech, and hires by committee. That means none of this fancy electronic databases and data mining stuff - at our shop, résumés get photocopied and handed out physically to the committee members. We never see the original and its fancy paper - the only one who does is the secretary who does the photocopying, and she’s not in a position to have any input into hiring. I dunno what happens to the original - goes on a file somewhere, I guess. So if the eager young job applicant has been conned into shelling out for some fancy marbled paper, it doesn’t impress us - we curse it because fancy marbled paper doesn’t photocopy well, and obscures the text!
Far better to get some plain, good quality bond; maybe a light cream or something. But try a trial run - print your résumé on the sheet and photocopy it to see if it’s still legible.
- Of course I don’t mean that. That’s just hyperbole. I know we’re not supposed to threaten people with death here on the SDMB. Not even telemarketers, apparently. All life is sacred.
But if we get one more piece of marbled crap with cutsey clip art, I just might CRACK!
Depends on the hiring committee - mentioning pipes on your résumé would get my vote to interview you! *
Even if it is on marbled paper with cutsey clip art.
What is up with people putting their photographs on their resumes? I’m always getting people bringing in little headshots to where I work, and wanting me to photocopy it onto their resume.
(What’s really fun is when they do that, then want me to fax it! Yeah, like your photo’s even going to be VISIBLE as a human face once it’s run through the fax machine.)
Unless you’re applying for a job at Sanrio.
Now that I understand and agree with. If I interveiw 15 people in one day, by the end of the day it’s really hard to keep them all straight, no matter how good your notes are. Having a photo on the résumé, even a poor quality one, helps to remember which one was which.
I’ve been using nice ivory-colored good quality paper for mine, which all have to be sent out. (I’m sure they’re photocopying them around, so I made sure it wasn’t too thick for a crappy copier.) This is for jobs as a librarian, BTW, which is often a more “traditional” environment - dosen’t hurt to do it the way I was taught back in the day.
My question is, does nobody follow the “don’t fold your resume” rule anymore? I noticed they had nice envelopes to match my nice paper at Staples, but they were letter size! I was always told to send my resume in a big page-sized envelope, so it wasn’t folded. (Also can’t hurt to keep it from getting lost, I guess.) Does everybody fold it in thirds now? Because I send mine in a big envelope, damn it.
An extra question… When sending a resume by E-mail, am I supposed to paste the resume straight into the body of the E-mail or send it as an attachment? It looks much better in Word, because I have it arranged in columns, but if people never open attachments, maybe I should change the format.
While I can relate to Northern Piper’s practical perspective on a photo helping you keep candidates straight, in the US I’d definitely advise against including it.
US companies typically prefer not to share any written record of race, sex or age with a hiring manager. Remember, this manager may or may not interview you. So if you get weeded out, you might assume it was because of your race, sex or age if they were evident to the manager when he reviewed your resume and saw the photo.
HR departments will typically cut off photos, or ask you to resubmit without. This is the kind of delay/ hassle you don’t want associated with your resume.
With regard to paper, my recommendation is to err on the side of caution and use something white just slightly above laser-paper quality. Bring enough so that if the committee has the junky copies from the HR intern and the copier from hell, you can hand them a clean copy at the interview.