What is the deal with resume paper and should I succomb?

It’s fancy. I used it because my mom got it for me. It didn’t make a difference in the end. (Of course, 90% of my applications were also online.) I would just go with bright, white paper.

Unless you want a job where cosmetic details are important. Then you probably need to pay attention to them yourself.

Totally frivolous. In fact, I would be suspect of a resume printed on fancier paper, in thoughts that the person may be trying to compensate somehow.

White or off-white heavier paper like a 24 lb. is perfect. Anything else looks amateur, like the content of your resume doesn’t speak for itself. If you have a need to fancy it up, go for cotton content.

ok, they won’t really be looking at the paper, but whats on it. Trust me, someone who got a job soley on the color of paper they used wasn’t in the position for long.

Call me oldschool but I was told that the paper you choose for your resume serious affects how much people take you seriously. It’s just presentatIon. It’s like, what’s the deal with a suit and tie and should I seccomb.

However, things like font selection and formatting do make a difference in perception. Your resume is part of branding yourself, and how the information is organized on the page, font selection, etc. makes an intangible impression of professionalism.

I’m a grad student looking for her first job in the field. The majority of my “experience” is school and more school (although there was a nice trip to Antarctica in there, too). I know that my resume is not as “full” as it could be, but I also know (and I would think that my future employers would know, as well) that I have spent the past 3 years (after undergrad) advancing my degree. I see what you all are saying about not wanting to make it look too “fluffy”. You’re all sort of reaffirming what I thought. Thanks!

If you do succumb, make sure you run spell-check before you print it out!

@pupn: Haha. Thanks. Good Lord. I can’t believe I missed that.

A concise, well-organized resume gets my attention better than a fancy one.

You have to realize what happens to most resumes: They are scanned so they can be distributed electronically. And after that, the color and quality of the paper doesn’t matter. Even if you are presenting your resume in person at the conference, be realistic about what happens to it after that.

Make sure the color of the paper will not interfere with the scanning. Don’t use colored ink. Don’t use watermarks.

When you give your resume to a company, it will be photocopied and passed around. The only person who sees the pretty paper will be the person who opens the envelope and makes the photocopies for the files and for the interviewers or the representative you hand it to at the conference—the people who make the hiring and firing decisions will only see a photocopy.

This means that typographic clarity and readability are far, far more important than the paper you print it on.

I would only add that you might want to do it on a laser printer over an inkjet for extra crispness.

Use a sans-serif font. (I’m partial to Verdana myself)

Even assuming it wouldn’t be copied or scanned, I prefer white paper. I do like to use a nice heavier weight than standard printer paper, just for the feel of it.

The reason I would go for a very slight off-white with a cream not gay undertone is because if the lighting is too harsh in the office the bright white is too glary but it should look white not yellowy. Oh and plush paper makes you look like money isn’t important

‘gay undertone’ made me giggle.

Well I do live in San Francisco <;)

Fancy paper probably doesn’t matter: relevant experience and a projection of confidence in the talent you bring to the table in an organized format are much more important.

But something to attract attention in a professional way could make your resume stand out in a huge pile- maybe your own ‘Obama logo’ with a bold ‘L’ in a circle fringed with those weather map semicircles and triangles.

From where I sit, a fancy resume is completely irrelevant. When I’m looking at resumes to hire someone, this is what I look at.

Can I scan the resume quickly? Is it laid out clearly, so that if I want to find out where you went to school or if you’ve ever had a position involving Mac OS X, I can figure that out without having to read the whole thing? Is it clearly and specifically written, in a concise style?

Do you have experience relevant to what we’re looking for, or a strong suggestion that you’re flexible enough to learn what we do here? If you do have experience, is it complementary to what people already have? Have you worked on any projects similar to what we’ve got coming up in the next year?

Do you have an interesting education? Did you major in something not technical, so that when we’re talking at the company party, we can chat about east Indian art or game theory or our favorite Victorian novels? The best technical people are also often creative people who are used to thinking critically and subjectively, and that’s something that an art history or psychology degree will show that a computer science or “mangement of information systems” degree won’t show.

Does my BS alarm go off? Did you claim experience in PERL (someone with useful experience would write Perl), or C/C++ (someone with useful experience would claim C and C++ separately, as they’re very different languages), or that you’re experienced with MAC computers (experienced people know that Mac is short for Macintosh, not an acronym). Do you have spelling errors on your resume? Do you have a lot of big words to bethump me with, and remarkably few objective measurements or specific details?

If I were looking for a graphic designer, an attention-getting logo might be a good thing. For most positions, though, it’s a waste of effort—it would set off the BS alarm when I saw someone using an attention-grabbing logo instead of providing real content in the resume.

Also, I mentioned this discussion to one of the HR people here, and she said that when they get a resume, it gets scanned and fed into a text-indexing program, and then the original gets filed. Aside from the HR flunky who opens the envelope and does the scanning, everyone else sees your resume either as a scanned-in PDF, as a photocopy, or as digital text.

If you spend as much time and effort making your resume clear, complete, and concise as you do agonizing over whether to print it out on light grey, eggshell, cream, or baby blue paper, you’ll probably get more interviews.