TYPING
Your ability to type well isn't always in direct correlation with your professional, management, or executive ability. So even if you have personally typed your several drafts, spend the few dollars and let a typing service do the final draft for the printer, unless you are truly an expert typist. You want a service that will follow your layout instructions, use reasonably new equipment, and do the work promptly. While not essential, if the equipment can produce italics or boldface, these can be useful for emphasizing words or phrases in your resume. The typewriter must produce a sharp, clear, black image so that your printer will get good copies from the offset press.
If the typing service has a typewriter with a memory device, so much the better. Your inevitable corrections in layout can be done faster and cheaper, without the typist redoing the entire page.
Should you consider having a printer set type for your draft? No, this will probably cause an unfavorable reaction in your reader, whoever he or she is. Custom has it that resumes are typed. Furthermore, modern typing can provide different type styles, if you feel you need them. However, in certain fields or lines of work, it is common to submit typeset resumes. For example, graphic artists, typesetters, and publishing professionals may well follow this route.
What type style should you select? Should you use pica or elite? It doesn't really matter, as long as the type is easy to read and isn't too unusual. Remember, you are making your "first impression". You want your resume reader to give quick-glance approval to layout and typing and then start reading, or at least skimming, the contents. Type style doesn't get you an interview; content does. Standard 8.5-by-11-inch paper is expected and should be used.
Check out several services; you want the best, not the cheapest. Ask to see samples of their typing, especially resume. Decide which service offers the best quality.
Cost for typing can be by the page, by the hour, or by the job. Rates vary, depending on service location, service size, competition, and size of community. You should personally proofread the final typed version prior to printing.
PRINTING
Fine-quality offset printing is the best way to reproduce your resume, assuming that your printer takes pride in the finished product and runs good clean copies, and that you have chosen the correct paper. Every community has one or more "fast printers." These services are capable of doing an excellent job; so are the small commercial printers.
Paper stock should be twenty-four-pound white bond, with a 25 percent rag content, not a sulfite bond, or a printer's "just-as-good bond." Fifty percent or 100 percent rag paper is wasteful and unnecessary. Twenty-pound stock and sulfite bond is what most people get from a fast printer, unless they specify and pay for the better paper. If you prefer a colored stock, and many executives do, go right ahead. But specify off-white, ivory, or very pile beige. Avoid heavy shades.
Sometimes you will know that only a handful of resume will be needed, perhaps six or twelve. Some photo-copy services now use state-of-the-art machines and provide excellent quality copies on a wide variety of paper stocks and colors. Cost is minimal at twenty to twenty-five cents per sheet. Inspect a sample before you order. Remember, quality is of paramount importance.
Photocopies from your local library will not do. They are great for copies of most everything but not for executive resumes. Of course, in a real emergency, such a copy might have to serve.
How many copies will you need? Maybe more than you think, so be generous.
Before you visit a printer and place your order, decide on the number of copies you will need for employer mailings, for ad answering, for executive search consultant mailings, for your contacts, for your own use, and for a reserve. It’s cheaper to run more now than to be short and have to rerun. Also, when you begin to run out of resumes, you might tend to conserve the few you have left. That's a mistake. Your emphasis is on getting job interviews by using resumed, not on saving resumes.
An individually typed resume can be used in isolated cases, to give you a customized product for a specific situation where your normal, printed versions do not fit. The need seldom arises, especially if you print one set of resumes without an objective and use your cover letter to bring out your job or career objective.
If your resume has two or three pages, gather each set and staple it in the upper left-hand corner; this is a small security measure to keep the set together when it might be one of dozens or scores on somebody's desk.
It might occur to you to consider attaching a photograph to your resume. There are a number of reasons why you should not do so, the primary one being that a potential employer is not interested in what you look like but in what he or she believes you might do for the organization or for him or her personally.
