Skiilight Interactive – Seattle Marketing, Web Design, and Graphic Design

Skiilight sometimes crawls Monster.com looking for companies that think they need someone in-house for their marketing. In reality, our firm can provide the same solutions with less overhead – so in these cases we say hello and offer our services. Naturally, I have a Monster.com account (and a LinkedIn!). So recently I had just completed a resume overhaul and was proud of my work. I’d spent all evening rearranging information and cutting out what didn’t need to be there. Being in design and communications (and knowing how to manipulate MS Word), I built a resume that conveyed my information beautifully.

So, I uploaded my resume to Monster and like Godzilla to Tokyo, powerlines started falling and I could hear the screams of people running away. Monster ignored a good majority of my formatting, forcing my resume to two pages and destroying my carefully-honed style in the process.

What happened?

Through trial and error, I have decided that the following is what goes on behind the scenes when you upload your Word resume to Monster.com

1. Monster does not care that you changed the margins. They will revert to the default margin size.
2. Monster has no interest in your bullet styles. It will default to Symbol, size 12.
   • Because of this, any line spacing less than single space will be lost on the line with the bullet. Curiously, Monster DOES respect your line spacing setting, but the 12pt type size will force the bulleted line to a miniumum of single space. If that initial bulleted line continues into a second line, the second line will retain the line spacing. In my case, .8.
3. Monster will not retain any images that may be in your resume.
4. Monster will force any header or footer information into the body area. Don’t even try to gain that little bit of extra space.

Fig. 1 – Original Resume

Fig. 2 – Edited to comply with Monster’s reformatting.
Note line spacing difference. My 0.8 line spacing is retained for first job description,
ignored in second job description because of the size 12 bullet.

Fig. 3 – How Monster displays it in HTML. (note the line spacing and bullets)

Even though the line spacing looks incorrect in Fig. 3, once downloaded from the link above (“Download Job Seeker’s Word Resume”), the Word doc will display correct(er) line spacing, as shown in Fig. 2.

So, I hope this might be an interesting read to anyone who may have wrestled with Monster’s formatting in the past.