Resumes are primarily for UX hiring managers — those responsible for advancing your application for a UX job opportunity. It’s essential to understand and empathize with the hiring-manager persona. Resumes are scanned for about 6-7 seconds in the familiar F-shaped pattern discovered from our past eye tracking research.

Guidelines

Don’t submit an academia-formatted resume when applying to an industry job. Follow these guidelines for creating an effective resume:

• Microsoft Word and PDF file formats: Word documents (.DOCX) are the most universally read by ATSs, but PDFs are advantageous because they preserve styling and formatting. Use PDF when sending directly to a human and Word when submitting through an ATS. Always check that your text is selectable and that hyperlinks work.

• 1 page: Strive to fit your resume on one page. The result will be more scannable and useful for hiring managers. Use a second page if you have 20+ years of work experience that is too difficult to summarize on one page.

• Wide margins: Significantly widen your resume’s margins (.50–.75 in, 1.27–1.91 cm) if you have extensive work and educational history. Wider margins force you to keep achievements to one line and make the puzzle of fitting content just a little easier.

• One readable font: Pick a serif or sans-serif web-safe font and size it between 10–12 points. Avoid thin, cursive, decorative, or wide-set fonts like Verdana, which, although readable, are space-inefficient.

• Simple layout: Don’t use headers, footers, tables, or columns in Word. These can confuse ATS scans and result in misread data.

• Consistent: Ensure that all submitted resumes and any web versions of your resume (such as LinkedIn or on your portfolio site) are generally consistent. While it’s a good idea to tweak your resume to emphasize specific skills or achievements for a particular job posting.

• Reverse chronological order: Communicate your work and educational activity from most recent to least recent to ensure that the most relevant content is highest on the resume.

• Simple visual design: Avoid background fills and intrusive graphics. Pick one high-contrast accent color and use it sparingly for key content like job titles. Ensure that your body text is near black in color and has high contrast.

• Print-friendly: Print your resume in draft-quality black and white after any significant resume revision. Paper-based reading is easier than online reading for reviewing informative text under time constraints and  paper leads to higher reading speeds compared to tablet devices like the iPad and Kindle. Printed resumes also make it easy for hiring managers to annotate and sort applicants.

• Error-free: You have ample time to proofread your resume before applying to jobs. Submitting a resume with multiple errors may be perceived by hiring managers as a tendency for carelessness with deliverables.

• Truthful: Embellishments, pertinent-work or educational-information omissions, or fabrications will be discovered someday. Lying to your next potential manager in your first interaction is a bad sign and could lead to termination in your future.

An example of a hypothetical UX-career changer’s Word-formatted resume. While not aesthetically pleasing, it should deliver the information successfully through many applicant-tracking systems.

An example of that same hypothetical UX-career changer’s resume in PDF format. It makes conservative alignment, spacing, visual, and typographic adjustments to convey design skills while emphasizing useful content for human readers.