Building a Resume in Microsoft Word

Word gets dismissed as old-fashioned and remains the most reliable general tool for this job. The trick is spending ten minutes on setup rather than formatting as you go.

Why Word is still the safe answer

Three practical reasons.

Its PDF export produces a proper text layer, so the document can be read by parsers and screen readers alike. Some employers specifically request a .docx file, particularly recruitment agencies who want to edit the formatting before passing it on. And nothing about a Word-produced PDF looks unusual to a screening system, which is not true of every design tool.

The weaknesses are real but manageable: it will happily let you build something fragile, and its own templates are inconsistent.

Start blank, not from a template

Counterintuitive, and it saves time overall.

Several of Word’s built-in resume templates use tables or text boxes to achieve their layout and put contact details in the document header. Those choices are invisible while you work and they interfere with text extraction, so a tidy-looking template can produce a mangled parse. See Word resume templates for which to fix and how.

Starting from a blank document, as Microsoft describes for creating a document, gives you a single column of ordinary paragraphs, which is exactly what you want.

The ten-minute setup

Do these in order, once, before typing any content.

One: page setup. Margins at 0.75 inch all round is a good starting point, adjustable to 0.5 if you need space later. Letter size in the US.

Two: define four styles. This is the step that separates a document that stays tidy from one that drifts. Microsoft documents customising or creating styles, and you need four:

• Name. Your font at around 20 point, bold.
• Section heading. Same font at 12 point, bold, with 12 points of space before and 4 after.
• Job line. 11 point bold for the title, regular for employer and dates.
• Body bullet. 10.5 or 11 point, single spaced, with a small space after.

Set them up, then apply them. Never format directly with the toolbar, because that is where inconsistency comes from.

Three: turn on formatting marks. You want to see paragraph marks, tabs and spaces while working. It makes stray tabs and double paragraph breaks visible, which is most of what goes wrong.

Four: set one font throughout. A widely available one. See the resume fonts guide.

Alignment without tables

The most common structural mistake in Word resumes is using a table to line up dates on the right. It looks correct and extracts unpredictably.

Use a right tab stop instead. Set a right-aligned tab at the right margin on your job line style, then press Tab once between the employer and the date. Everything lines up perfectly, the paragraph remains a single ordinary paragraph, and the text extracts in reading order.

That single technique replaces almost every table people put in a resume. The detail is in Word resume formatting.

Contact details go in the body

Not in the header, however natural that feels.

Some parsers skip headers and footers entirely, which can produce a record of you with no phone number or email. Put your name and contact line as the first two paragraphs of the document body.

The same applies to a page number on a two-page resume: acceptable in a footer, but your name should also appear in the body of the document, not only in the running header.

Bullets that behave

Word’s automatic list formatting is the source of a great deal of frustration, most of it avoidable.

Use a single bullet level. Nested sub-bullets on a resume are almost never justified and they are where indentation drifts. Set the indent in your bullet style rather than by pressing Tab, because a tabbed bullet and a styled bullet look identical and behave differently when you edit around them.

If your bullets start misbehaving, the fix is usually to select the affected paragraphs and reapply the style rather than to nudge indents. See Word resume troubleshooting.

Before you send

Four checks, in this order.

1. Clean the document properties. Word’s Document Inspector removes hidden data including author names, comments and tracked changes. A file arriving credited to a template author or containing your editing history is a poor look.
2. Export to PDF properly, using the route Microsoft documents for saving or converting to PDF, rather than printing to an image.
3. Do the paste test. Open the PDF, select all, paste into a plain text editor, and read whether the order and content survived.
4. Name the file for a stranger. Resume-Okafor-Operations.pdf, not resume final v3.pdf.

When to send the Word file

Send PDF by default. Send .docx when the posting or the recruiter asks for it, which happens most often with agencies.

If you do send Word, run the Document Inspector first and check the fonts are common ones, since a substitution on their machine will change your layout and possibly your page count.

Related

For the built-in templates, see Word resume templates. For the formatting mechanics, see Word resume formatting, for fixing problems Word resume troubleshooting, and for reusable style sets advanced Word resume techniques. For alternatives, see the Google Docs resume guide.

Or skip the setup and build one free.