When preparing a résumé, the use of bold print is one of those thoughts lingering in the back of your mind that you should be sure to incorporate. Once all of the information has been gathered and typed into some sort of format, and the résumé is essentially complete, the first thing the average person does is goes back and highlights items throughout the presentation in BOLD.

This event usually signals the light at the end of the tunnel, as the preparation process was absolutely exhausting. The gathering of information took days, and trying to come up with a format was equally tiring, when faced with so many choices. Just having to consider all of the different approaches to résumé-writing that you see on the Internet today can be intimidating. Then, you have to complete the task of compiling (writing) your information in the “best style” ever, in ways that each of us has fantasized will “wow” the reviewer. Finally, after days or even weeks, the “Best Résumé Ever” is in the final stages of being ready to submit. With glee and a sense of accomplishment, the finishing touches are added to define a creative flair.

On average, the subject matter or things that people will use bold font for can be quite amusing. Some presentations will have only the dates of employment in bold (2003-Present), while others will have the candidate’s name and category headings in bold (Professional Experience or Education), and several among them will use capital letters to help make these headings stand out. In certain cases, the applicant’s address, phone number or even e-mail address is considered important information, and calls out for bold accents. On occasion, you will find the employer name and/or job title prominently displayed in bold highlights, and, of course, there are those that direct attention to a high school or college degree, and institution.

For just as many people you find out there preparing a résumé, you will find variations in the use of bold print when adding the final touches. What many people do not consider is that there really is a strategy involved to incorporating bold print. How you choose to use bold print can portray quite a bit of information to the reviewer about your approach to life, or to getting the job done. If your use of bold print seems haphazard, inconsistent, and does not portray a theme or employ a methodical approach, you may be sending the wrong message. Notice how nothing in this paragraph seems to stand out?

Consider the following perspective when you set out to send a message to the employer and make the decision to use bold highlights in your résumé presentation:

The purpose of bold font is to draw the eye to certain information, from the beginning of your résumé, right down the first page and into the second. The information portrayed in bold should be the information you want the reviewer to notice and remember. When you consider that the typical résumé only receives 10-20 seconds of attention (some résumés receive even less), the use of bold print can be your best friend. Did you find your eye drawn to this statement when you began reading this paragraph?

Only the most valuable bits of information in a résumé should be boasted in bold, and depending upon your career field or objective, this information will vary from one presentation to another.

The first and most common strategy is to highlight your name. You want to use an interesting font that portrays personality so that the employer will remember the visual impact and associate your name with the position you are seeking.

The second most important thing to highlight is your job title. Most presentations today will list a job title right up front, which should be the next thing the reviewer sees. The job title you choose to list should match the position you are applying for, and should be in bold. This covers several important areas: 1) You have told the employer that you are exactly who they are looking for and stated your objective early on; and 2) You have saved the employer valuable time, as they do not have to determine what your value is, or the position you are seeking, by reading through your information. This small attribute will leave a positive impression on the reviewer — almost on a most subconscious level — but there nonetheless.

This strategy can also be applied if you are using an objective statement or a profile narrative in your résumé. Make sure that you are careful to incorporate a job title in your statement, and that you highlight the information. Remember that there is never a one size fits all résumé: you must design each résumé for the position you are currently seeking. Along these lines, make sure that you highlight the job titles you have held when you incorporate your employment history. This strategy will draw the reviewer’s eye to your previous assignments, show progression in responsibilities and document advancement in your career field.

At this point, we have made sure the employer knows who we are and what job we are seeking, and reinforced the information by highlighting the job titles previously held. Great start! In other words, the target employer could care less about the names of your previous employers. And remember, if you choose to highlight the previous dates of employment, you are taking valuable review seconds away from other information in your presentation — not to mention drawing attention to the length of employment or any gaps in employment history you may have experienced.

The next strategy is to highlight a valuable contribution or accomplishment you have achieved in order to keep the eye moving and prompt the reviewer to gather as much valuable information as possible in the short period allotted. By applying the bold font to a portion of one or more statements further down in your résumé, you will accomplish this task. For this strategy to be effective, the information you highlight needs to make a statement in itself. Review the following statement to get an idea of how this works. This statement provides two different opportunities to use the bold print effectively:

Negotiated a $10 million venture capital investment in XYZ Corporation, which generated $1 billion in revenue over 15 years.

Negotiated a $10 million venture capital investment in XYZ Corporation, which generated $1 billion in revenue over 15 years.

Negotiated a $10 million venture capital investment in XYZ Corporation, which generated $1 billion in revenue over 15 years.

Notice how the highlighted text makes a statement in itself and could stand alone?

Negotiated a $10 million venture capital investment.

Generated $1 billion in revenue over 15 years.

Be selective in the information you choose to highlight and refrain from overkill. Too much bold print can render the entire process just as ineffective as a bad strategy in choosing the wrong information to highlight. As a general rule of thumb, the use of bold type is most effective when used sparingly and well-spaced throughout the document.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with highlighting your education, a degree or special training that supports your objective. This is especially true if the employer has determined that a particular degree or level of education is a condition of employment. If this is the case, then you may want to incorporate the education information on the first page to draw the same attention to this qualification as you would your name and job title.

As long as you follow the basic concept, you will be able to intrigue the reviewer with the information presented in your résumé, and effectively portray the potential or value you will bring to the organization. The competition is tough, and the little things that you use to promote yourself can go a long way. Your strategic use of bold print will serve to draw the eye down the first page and onto the second as the reviewer tries to absorb the most important information as quickly as possible!

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development

Structured as five-minute webisodes, the Professional Development Series is a ‘meat and potatoes’ guide that is available to anyone with access to the Web. Mary Delaney of Careerbuilder.com, Lon McGowan of iClick, Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, David A. Junge, MD, Chris MacAskill of SmugMug, Warren Brown of Cake Love and Ann Marie Harrington of Embolden, among others, have devoted their time to speak candidly about their experiences coming up in their respective professions. These revealing interviews with this high caliber group of professionals has been assembled into one video collection that can now be viewed on Cambridge Who’s Who Connect and the Cambridge Who’s Who Video Channel.

The Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series was designed as an educational resource to enlighten those interested in realizing business growth, career development and/or professional brand-building. Interspersed within each chapter are handy hints and tips that sum-up and reinforce the notions expressed by the featured professionals. Each of the five initial Professional Development Series webisodes also focuses on a particular subject: Branding and Marketing, Networking, Business Financing, Motivation and Sales. For a taste of what these content-rich chapters entail, be sure to watch the Cambridge Who’s Who Video Series Introduction 

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

The first full chapter, Branding and Marketing: The Right Way to Attract Attention, explains the significance of establishing your brand, which is the single most important means to convey your identity, strengths and goals. Part of branding involves informing your clients or contacts about a promise that you are willing to make to them – it is up to you to determine how you go about fulfilling that commitment and conveying that in your branding campaign. This episode of the Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series also explores the relationship of networking to promoting your brand and marketing your products and services. 

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

In Strategies for Successful Networking the featured experts emphasize the value of keeping up with your daily networking activities. This includes interacting regularly with professionals in and outside of your industry, maintaining a strong Web presence and utilizing several online social media tools. When it comes to successful networking, your appearance – as in what you wear and how you carry yourself – can serve as the perfect conversation starter because, you never know what professional opportunities lie ahead. Chris MacAskill of SmugMug leads by example.

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

The Business Financing: Tips to Transform Your Ideas into Reality video cuts to the chase with a valid insight: financing for your company or bright idea begins with a solid, detailed business plan. From there, funding your venture becomes a constant process of setting realistic goals, monitoring your cash flow and redirecting your strategy at a moment’s notice. Two passionate and successful business owners, Warren Brown of Cake Love and Lon McGowan of iClick, have each learned first-hand the challenges of establishing their own companies; they offer valid advice on how to ignite your entrepreneurial fire.

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

Cambridge Who’s Who Professional Development Series

Proven Sales Techniques contains important information about effective sales tactics, and it also bestows relevant tips on how to handle yourself as a professional. Learn from some of the most successful salespeople in the game – many of them have faced failure in their careers, but have used such experiences to sharpen their skills rather than accept defeat. Mary Delaney, an executive at CareerBuilder.com, shines as a beacon of inspiration in this episode, detailing her 12-step plan to get potential clients on the phone. The segment concludes with a list describing the “Top 10 Characteristics of a Successful Salesperson.”

By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Claire Power Murphy

Cambridge Who’s Who Industry Expert Claire Power Murphy

Much has been said about the importance of proper branding, marketing, networking, financing, motivation, sales, expertise and technology use. There are many resources available to support your business, especially here at Cambridge Who’s Who.

You learn and attempt to apply all the techniques and your business grows along with the oft-accompanying stress. Or the business does not grow. In either case the KEY factor is you!

The time has come to add a new component to growing a healthy business and that is you! Do you grow regardless of circumstances?

Have you noticed the acceleration of new knowledge with which you must keep abreast? Have you experienced the fast pace and increase in competition? If you wish to ‘keep up’ and even excel, it is time to examine the degree of flexibility with which you flow with the times.

Much more than you realize has to do with the condition of your own body and its ability to adapt. Is your circulation of ‘life-giving’ blood flowing freely? Is your chemistry balanced so you can maintain a level head while incorporating increasing numbers of people and new ideas into your business?

You pay much attention to the quality of fuel for your automobile. Are you fueling yourself with the highest quality fuel (nutrition) to attain the maximum energy to keep ‘ahead of the curve’?

Self-improvement IS the key element which will make a difference for you, your loved ones, society, AND your business!

Claire Power Murphy,
Cambridge Who’s Who Top Industry Expert:
Health, Wellness, and Nutrition!
www.selfrej.com

Claire Power Murphy is a Cambridge Who’s Who Top Industry Expert on health, wellness and nutrition.  To learn more about Claire’s area of expertise and service, please visit www.cambridgewhoswhoconnect. Here you can learn all you care to know about Claire, her esteemed colleagues and more in an interactive and informative format.

By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Bruce Deitrick Price

Here’s an odd thing to confess: I have been writing about education for 30 years. It has been an exciting adventure; it has also been at times totally mystifying.

We have grown to expect that there are faster, more pleasant ways to accomplish any task; conversely, there must be slower, ineffective ways of doing so. It is the second methodology that the education establishment seems to prefer. Our public schools appear almost intentionally designed to perform at a mediocre level. How can this tendency be explained?

When you look at the statistics and surveys, you will notice that they paint a consistently bleak picture. We spend billions every year on public education, yet SAT scores continue to fall. Our top students do not compete well with top students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. And then there is the really big mystery of 50 million functional illiterates. Who let this tragedy happen?

To answer these questions, I researched further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators from a century ago looked at life, children and this new field they had created. The unexpected reality is that they were not primarily focused on education as most of us understand the term, but were preoccupied with social engineering. Education was a set of tools with which they intended to build a new, more leveled society.

Many of the articles I have written attempt to explain where and why our educators got off track. I have been especially fascinated by the Reading Wars, a significant conflict in American education and a clear illustration of what can happen when elite educators lose their way. Basically, phonics was scorned; a flawed method called whole word was enshrined and literacy promptly started to decline.

As I gained more understanding about the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board to improve our public education system. We simply have to identify the failed ideas and get rid of them.

Education reformers typically try three other approaches: spend money, recommend new policies or point out best practices. I do not think these techniques will work now. The problem is that the education establishment is married to its bad ideas; these people are set in their ways. We need an intervention.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in an education war with our own educators. I want to persuade the public that this is an intellectual war – we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. I do not think we have any hope of improvement unless we confront what happened to American education: namely, that our schools were made ineffective by design.

So now we have to move in the opposite direction: discard the gimmicks that were smuggled into the system; then restore basics and academics to their proper prominence, albeit taught in the most ingenious ways. Our first job is to zero in on the dozens of overhyped “progressive” innovations that turned out, in practice, to be destructive and regressive. We will be better off without Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, No Memorization, Self-Esteem, Bilingual Education, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything and a dozen others.

Many people like to believe that our educators are clumsy or befuddled by fads. No, I am afraid not. You would have a much clearer sense of what happened if you were to imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey seated around a table discussing their ideological goals, devising tactics, and trying to keep the public from interfering. I know people who shy away from the word “conspiracy,” but let’s be realistic. This track record goes back nearly a century. Let’s show respect for those 50 million functional illiterates who spent their lives in a twilight zone, thanks to John Dewey and his pals. You cannot create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade. I think the evidence proves that our education establishment did just that.

It is painful to deal with such an unpleasant history, but it is also very liberating. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Dewey and his friends were socialists; they were trying to create a socialist America. This goal is clear in their writings. For them, the obvious first step was to reduce individualism and to raise more cooperative children. How do you do this? Dewey’s answer–and it is still in play–is that you drastically limit the time spent on reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., while giving much more time to group activities. And when you do teach substance, you teach it in muddled, ineffective ways. There is the whole agenda in a nutshell. It is only a matter of time before everybody knows a lot less and thinks much less clearly.

I should mention, by the way, that I never criticize teachers. I am concerned only with top education theorists, administrators, etc. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much the victims of these educators as the children and parents are.

—
Bruce Price deals with all of these topics on his website Improve-Education.org and in his fifth book “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA – What Happened to American Education.”