What are the most common resume design mistakes?

The most common design mistakes are clutter, text that is too small, inconsistent formatting and decoration that distracts from the content. Each one makes your resume harder to read, and some also make it harder for software to process.

Watch for:

• Cramming too much onto the page with tiny fonts and narrow spacing.
• Mixing several fonts, sizes and colours.
• Inconsistent dates, bullets and spacing between entries.
• Decorative graphics, icons, borders and skill bars.
• Centred or justified body text that is hard to scan.
• Low-contrast text, such as light grey on white.
• Text boxes, images of text or layouts that break when the file is converted.

The fix is usually to simplify: one or two fonts, one accent colour, consistent spacing, left-aligned text and clear headings. A clean single-column template avoids most of these problems from the start.