Resume Writing Tip: Slasher Secrets Revealed

I’ve mentioned before that some resume writers know me as The Slasher due to my superhuman ability to slash resumes down to size. How do I do it? Recently a colleague sent me a resume she wanted slashed, and I took note of my actions. Here’s a recap of how I turned a 2.25-page resume into a solid two-pager. I hope it helps if you need to shorten your resume:

1. Increased the font size: This might seem anti-slasherlike, but the writer had made the font so tiny that my eyes glazed over when I first opened the document. The key to a great resume layout is readability, so I immediately changed Garamond 10 point to Garamond 11.5. MS Word tip: You can use the “Find and Replace” feature to find one font size and replace with another instead of manually changing it section by section. Here’s a link to James Marshall’s About.com tutorial on how to do this: Replacing Font Formats With Word’s Replace Dialog Box

2. Adjusted page margins: The top and bottom margins were set at 1″ and the left and right were 1.25″ (I think this is MS Word’s default setting). I like nice, wide margins and many hiring managers like them, too — it’s good to have margin space to jot notes on hard copies. But the default was unnecessarily wide, so I changed to .8″ all around. (BTW, the margin adjustment added a lot of space, and there’s nothing like the thrill of watching the resume get shorter during a slash job. Yes, the life of a resume writer can be very sad indeed!)
3. Cleaned up orphans and widows: The font size increase created orphans and widows throughout the document, so I made minor text edits to clean up the typography. Widows are those pesky single words taking up a whole line at the end of a paragraph, and orphans are the first lines of paragraphs at the bottom of pages that get separated from the rest of the paragraph on the following pages.
4. Consolidated early work history: The experience section went back to the 1980s and there was too much detail about old, irrelevant jobs. I created an “Early Career” section that had two sentences referring to several of these jobs, which freed up enough space to make the resume a two-pager. Another Slasher success!
Best wishes,
By Kim Isaacs and courtesy of ResumePower blog.