For Love of Money, Part I

It’s Not a Typo, I Meant “Of”

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”
—Emily Dickinson

I come from a helpful family. A colleague of mine recently moved to the Nashville area and I told him if he gets a flat tire on the side of 840, the older gent in the cowboy hat who will randomly stop and help him change it is probably my dad. My mom never lets anyone leave her house empty-handed, even if they only come in for a minute. Whenever a friend moves to a new home, my brother is there bright and early on moving day with his weightlifting belt and gloves. My helpful thing is doing people’s resumes. 

Putting a resume together is an exercise in creative writing, which is why it’s in Shelf Life today. You know what they say: The oldest profession is selling yourself; the second-oldest profession is helping people write resumes so they can sell themselves more effectively. 

Yes, resumes are colonial; yes, we all need to smash the patriarchy; but as long as resumes are still a thing I will be helping my friends game the employment system with well-designed, high-impact resumes. I am resume Batman. By day I dismantle the system from inside and by night I dismantle the system with I don’t know I lost my train of thought. Batmobile or whatever.

I only provide the actual service for personal friends and family but I am putting all the highlights of a resume revamp into this here article so you can take them and apply them to your own document.

Here are my qualifications for helping with your resume:

• Writer

• Editor (typo-catching kind)

• Editor, again (page-layout tricks kind)

• By “tricks” I mean tricking people with creative layouts

• Hiring manager 

• Job getter/haver

I mainly work in a humanities-oriented field but I’ve successfully done resumes for all kinds of candidates including tech and STEM. You know your specific field best but the tips below are fairly universal unless I specify otherwise. If you’re making a federal resume I can’t help you with that; those are the devil’s documents and I know as little about them as possible.

As you surmised from the title, this topic is coming at you in two parts. Today’s article covers hiring discrimination tactics generally and then the layout of your resume. Tuesday’s is about writing and organizing the content of your resume. If I have space on Tuesday I’ll go over cover letters or they might get their own topic another time. You’ll have to wait and be surprised.

Anyway. I want to say three things about discrimination first. 

The word discriminate means to notice or perceive difference among multiple things or distinguish one thing from another or others. For instance, to look at a painting and discriminate different shades of green; or to listen to a symphony and discriminate the sound of only the bassoon; or to discriminate between right and wrong acts. In that sense, reviewing resumes to pick one candidate to get a job is inherently an act of discrimination. Anyone looking at resumes is expecting to discriminate the differences among applicants in order to discriminate the best candidate. If you are hiring someone for a position as a master carpenter and one applicant has 25 years of carpentry experience and another zero carpentry experience, it is not wrong to discriminate in favor of the one who has the experience to do the job. 

Next, it’s important to note that aside from those characteristics that are appropriate to discriminate in favor of (qualifications), there are characteristics upon which it is illegal for an employer to discriminate. These are the protected characteristics under federal law (race, color, religion, sex or gender identity, national origin, age 40 or older, disability, and genetic information including family medical history). State and local laws may have additional legally protected characteristics; for instance, the District of Columbia prohibits discrimination based on marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, and family responsibilities (eg, child- or eldercare).

Finally, that leaves a whole gray area in between appropriate and illegal of inappropriate-but-legal things that employers use to discriminate in favor of or against candidates. There are degrees of inappropriate-but-legal discrimination. Favoring someone who graduated from the same college as the hiring manager is less inappropriate than eliminating someone from contention because their mailing address is in a low-income area or in an apartment building instead of a single-family home. 

Hiring managers use information from resumes to make assumptions about people’s protected characteristics and discriminate on those in such a way that they either genuinely believe they are not crossing a legal line or believe they are being clever enough not to be caught and punished. Some of the ones I have personally encountered on hiring committees: 

• Of a person whose college graduation dates implied age over 40: “They’re going to want too much money.”

• Of a person whose address was in a majority-Black neighborhood: “They won’t want to commute this far, they’ll quit in a week.”

• Of a person who put relevant volunteer work for their child’s preschool on their resume: “I could see them needing a lot of time off for family obligations.”

Then there’s also the ubiquitous “not a good fit for our organizational culture”—which, what does that even mean?—and one memorable instance of an outright illegal, “She just got married, we don’t want someone who will need maternity leave in a year and then never come back” when a candidate mentioned that she would need two weeks off, which she was prepared to take unpaid, for a honeymoon that had already been planned and paid for.

This is the kind of thing people tell you can happen and you’re like, “Nah, not really though, right? You mean like back in the 1970s before there were laws?” But people are just more subtle about it now. They definitely still do it.

All this to say, hiring managers are going to be discriminating against you for everything they possibly can, legal and illegal, appropriate and less appropriate. I started hiring people in 2006 or 2007 so I learned a lot of neat tricks like wearing a really sharp suit and developing a really firm handshake and removing my wedding ring before job interviews so people would be less likely to think I might have a baby anytime soon. I have a calendar item set up for next week to remove the college attendance years from my resume for the next time I send it out, since I am now arriving at a downright unemployable age (wants too much money).

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to manipulate your resume so that it has visual appeal, uses all the right action verbs, and conceals information (when possible and prudent) that could be used to discriminate against you unfairly.

Layout

Whether you’ve been in the workforce for five minutes or fifty years, you need to fit that resume on one page unless you’re in an executive leadership role, which, if you are, you don’t need this article, bye. One piece of 8.5 × 11-inch printer paper. That’s all you get. 

There used to be finicky rules about margins and people would advise you to leave 1-inch margins all around. That advice, as far as I can tell, comes from when employers were printing off resumes or even picking them up off the fax machine. Fun fax fact: I got my first office job by faxing my resume because that was the only way to apply to that company. I’m fax your resume with cover sheet years old. Now people are looking at resumes on screens so you don’t need to worry about your edges getting cut off in printing.

You want to make your resume look like it has a lot of white space while cramming as much information as possible into one page. Your side margins can be fairly slim (caveat to come), but leave a bit more margin at the top and bottom; further, you want a slightly larger bottom margin than top to prevent the text block looking like it’s sagging. This is a well-known typography convention but I learned it matting photos for gallery display.

My resume has super-skinny Twiggy-size side margins and it works just fine for me unless my boss is reading this in which case I have no idea how well it works, I haven’t sent out a resume in 5 million years. Here’s the big caveat with your side margins: You do not want a line of text going all the way across 8 inches of page. That’s too long for the eye to comfortably track and it looks bad. As I discussed in Well-Turned Page, people prefer a line length of 9 to 13 centimeters long (3.5 to 5 inches, approximately). That means if you need to get more text on the page by slimming the side margins you need a two-column design.

My resume, as an example, has the summary and experience presented in a 4.5-inch-wide left-hand column; and skills, extracurriculars, and education/certifications in a 2.5-inch-wide sidebar on the right; and the other 1.5 inches of page width are margins on the sides and between the columns. 

If you’re going to use color on your resume, pick one color in addition to black and stick with it. The body text of all your sections should be black; not navy, not dark gray, not dark brown. Black. If using an accent color, pick your color and use it plus one tint or shade of the same color if you need to (tint means you made it lighter by adding white; shade means you made it darker by adding black). If you’re going to put black text on top of your accent color, it needs to be a really light tint and if you want to put white text on top of your accent color don’t. Avoid accent colors in the red, pink, and purple families for now until the patriarchy is smashed.

Please don’t put your photo on your resume unless you’re an actor or you have some other job where it’s really relevant (maybe this is de rigueur in sales?). I don’t know who is out there telling people to put their headshot on their resume. Unless you’re certain this is the done thing in your specific field, don’t do it. See also: Clip art. Not even once. While we’re at it, don’t change the default background color of your document. Just leave it white.

You can also get away with a slightly smaller font than you used to be able to, because people can scale a PDF up to their comfort level. Don’t make it too tiny. What’s too tiny? It depends on the font. Ten and a half points is as small as you should go for most fonts. Use a max of two typefaces total for your resume: One for body text and one for display (headings). They can be one sans serif and one serif, or two sans serifs. I don’t recommend two serifs, really, it looks dated to me. Don’t use wild fonts. No Papyrus ever.

If you’re in a creative field like graphic design or the fine arts, all this goes out the window but you already knew that.

Making headings too big will eat up your page space so you can make them look bigger than they are by using a heavy or bold face and setting them in all caps. Make liberal use of rules to help divide sections and keep things neat and organized.

Here are some layout tips to find more space:

• Scan every line on your resume and look for one- or two-word turnovers—text that runs over to a new line with only one word or two short words on it. Find a way to shorten that sentence by one or two words to save a full line of vertical space.

• Combine related short bullets into one longer bullet with items separated by semicolons if you can save a line.

• Remove redundant or unnecessary information if it is taking up extra lines; for instance you don’t need to specify that you went to “University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Madison, WI.” Just because resumes are normally presented with the city and state of a university doesn’t mean you must include it if the meaning is obvious.

• Because resumes are now sent electronically, consider omitting information that can be conveyed by hyperlinking. For instance, I needn’t say I work at “American Society of Clinical Oncology, Alexandria, VA” when I can say I work at “American Society of Clinical Oncology” saving 16 characters and maybe a turnover.

Here’s a redacted copy of my resume so you can see the layout. Remember where you saw this, cause I’ll refer to it in the next one. I’ll share another redacted resume with Thursday’s article, too. Enjoy your Latin lesson and I’ll see you here next week.

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