Sometimes You Don’t Listen to the Experts

Guess which fond the font geeks want you to use on your resume. Just guess.

If you guessed Helvetica, well, what else would you guess, font heathen?

Not Times New Roman. No, no. That sends the message that you haven’t thought at all about the font you’re using – the equivalent of wearing sweat pants to a job interview.

Or is it just a load of hooey?

Bloomberg News gets to the bottom of it, by talking, of course, to font nerds.

They do offer good advice: Don’t’ use any flowery fonts. Don’t use Comic Sans.

But as for the rest of it? Do they really have any idea if hiring managers or HR is going to look at a resume and say, “Well, if this were done in Helvetica, we’d hire this guy on the spot. But since it’s Times New Roman, throw it in the junk pile”?

No.

So what do the people actually doing the hiring or advising you on resume writing say?

Well, this. And this.

There’s an awful lot of hate out there for TNR, which I just don’t understand. Yes, it’s MS Word’s default font. Yes, everyone uses it. Everyone uses oxygen too, unless you’re too much of an atomic hipster to want to follow the crowd. The “everyone else is using it” explanation doesn’t wash with me. But I’m no font snob. And maybe I have been passed over for jobs because of the font in my resume. But I doubt it.