Let’s Talk About Fonts on your Resume

Alright, guys. You knew this was coming; it’s the obligatory section in every career advising website. Let’s talk fonts.

First of all, why should you care about which font you use? To put it bluntly, you are not in high school anymore. No, no. You are in the adult world, and when you’re applying to a job at a large tech company or an internship at a banking firm with 3,000+ applicants you can be sure that whoever reads your resume will not think twice at tossing it out without reading a single word if it’s written in Comic Sans.

When you send in your resume to a company, think of it as sending a first message to someone you matched with on Tinder. How can you maximize your first impression to make sure you get a message back? Or a date? If you want to end up getting engaged to your dream company, you want to make sure that every little detail works in your favor when there are plenty of fish in the sea they can choose from.

Don’t freak out though! Your friendly neighborhood PCAs are here to help you stand out without losing professional composure. In other words, we’ve worked hard to compile a list of fonts to use on your resume, so all you have to do is pick and choose which one you like best. And if you want to go ahead and choose your own fonts, I’ve made a simple crash-course guide on fonts so you can make your own great font combinations.

You got this. So here you go. Here’s a quick guide on fonts, and 5 font combinations you should consider using on your resume.

Crash course: Fonts

Before we go into specifics, let’s learn the key differences between the two main kinds of fonts that exist: serif fonts, and sans-serif fonts. Serif fonts are those that have a little tail, as in the picture below. This makes them more readable on printed works, such as a resume on paper, as the eye flows better from letter to letter, but they may be harder to read on a screen.

Sans-serif fonts, on the other hand, do not have a little tail, making them much more distinct from each other. This makes them much more readable on a screen where resolution is not as good as on a printed paper.

As many resumes are online nowadays, many good font combinations use serif fonts on titles and headlines, and non-serif fonts on smaller text such as body paragraphs. However, some serif fonts may not work well with some non-serif fonts when combining them. As a rule of thumb, two fonts work well together when you can’t tell at first glance that you’ve switched fonts. In other words, if you’re focusing on the text itself instead of the font when you read a resume, then it’s a good font combination.

If you think you have a terrible eye for design though, check out Font pair. If you input a common font this website will tell you other fonts that work great with it.

(Source of picture: http://www.shawnhatjes.com/know-serif-vs-sans-serif/)

5 of our favorite font combinations:

Lustria and Lato

Quattrocento and quattrocento sans

Times New Roman and Source Sans Pro

Liberation Serif and Liberation Sans

Cambria and Calibri

There you go. Go out into the world with a great looking resume and celebrate your newfound professional-ness.  And bring your resume by the CCD for more assistance!  Schedule an appointment for a resume review on RICElink, drop by during walk-in hours (every weekday at Huff House, 12-1PM), and attend resume workshops (check out the full list on RICElink).

Kiara Reyes-Gamas is a Peer Career Advisor from Will Rice College.  She is a sophomore studying bioengineering and art history.