Don’t use Calibri for your résumé! Here’s why…

I have been applying to technical writing jobs for a few months now with suboptimal results. Since I started applying, I have:

  • Refreshed my LinkedIn
  • Updated my Linktree
  • Read technical writing blogs (passo.uno is my favorite)
  • Written an entire software documentation module
  • Designed and co-edited a magazine
  • Built this blog

One thing I haven’t done is optimize my résumé for Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

Thankfully, my résumé is already a single column – so no changes there!

But there is one big problem. When I ran a pdf of my résumé through my university’s AI-powered résumé checker from VMock, something very concerning happened…

Website flagging spelling errors that don't appear in the résumé. For example, it reads "ti" as "Q," making "information" become "informaQon."

The software flags spelling errors that aren’t actually there throughout my résumé! I think this website is very similar to ATS’s, so I suspect this issue may cause my résumé to be screened out.

I’ve also been editing and re-saving the same document for months now, so I took this chance to start from scratch. Here’s what I did:

  1. Created a blank Word document and set up all of my style formats first instead of making them up as I go.
  2. Typed my résumé completely from scratch – no copy-paste.
  3. Changed the body font from 12-point Calibri to 11-point Arial.

Here’s the result:

The same website now shows no spelling errors, except for the proper nouns it doesn't recognize

I’m pretty confident the font change made the most difference for this issue. However, it is possible that some invisible error in formatting was causing problems. I now also have a résumé document that will be much easier to edit.

So here’s the big lesson – don’t use Calibri for your résumé!

For functional documents like this, I usually don’t spend much time worrying about font beyond ensuring it is legible and widely compatible. However, in the era of AI, LLM’s, and ATS’s, there’s much more to consider…