Choosing a Resume Font

Helvetica or Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, Georgia, Garamond. These render and extract reliably everywhere, and the first three are among the standard fonts every PDF reader has built in — which means they need no embedding at all and cannot fail.

• Body text: 10 to 11.5pt. Below 10pt recruiters skim rather than read; above 12pt reads as padding.
• Section headings: 1 to 2pt above body, bold. Larger than that wastes vertical space.
• Your name: 16 to 22pt. It should be the largest thing on the page and nothing else should compete.
• Line height: 1.15 to 1.4. Tighter than 1.05 and low-quality extraction can interleave characters between lines.

• Anything decorative, script or handwritten. Illegible at 10pt and unprofessional at any size.
• Condensed or extra-light weights — they fail at small sizes and print poorly on office equipment.
• Comic Sans, Papyrus, Impact. These are jokes in every professional context.
• Fonts you downloaded that may not embed. If in doubt, use a standard one.

One font for everything is entirely acceptable and often looks the most composed. Two — one for headings and one for body — is the maximum. Three or more reads as a design exercise rather than a professional document.