What are templates all about? Why would, or should, a resume writer use one?

A long time ago, probably before some of my readers were even born, and even today, many people are unskilled in the use of word processing applications. The make things a bit easier for the non-technical, non-MS certified, average Jack or Jill, it was decided by the higher ups at the software development companies that, rather than teach people how to use their software, they would create templates that were supposed to be a one-size (technically three) fits all template file. Supposedly, you were only supposed to have to fill in the blanks, and voila, you have a resume in the perfect format that every employer was going to fall in love with.

To be fair, these worked well for a while, before the advent of the online job application and internet job search. They even worked well for professional resume writers before we found out that the background applications on the resume posting websites didn't like all the tables. If we wanted to use a template, it was only for printing. Then, we had to covert that awesomely esthetic resume into a .rtf file, and even lower down the technology pole into a .txt file. Not doing so would mean that our clients' resumes would never be read by the databases. Even worse, there was the copy and paste nightmare of the late 90s all the way up to the mid-00s.

Without a copy of the resume that was stripped of all its formatting, right aligned, and tediously gone through to ensure there were no formatting marks (soft returns, paragraph marks, ampersands, bullet points, and other things), when a customer would copy and paste his or her resume into a text box on a job search website, it would, invariably, end up looking like chicken scratch, with bullets in the middle of a line, to lines down from where it was supposed to be.

Plus there was the added "KEYWORDS" section at the bottom of the text (.txt) and scannable (.rtf for OCR scanners) so the database algorithms would recognize certain key words and phrases. Talk about a waste of space.

Fortunately, with the advancements that have been made in technology and the availability of free word processing training videos all across the web, really good resume writers (who, by the way, are worth their weight in gold) should never have to use a template to create your resume. Tables and text boxes can be used sparingly to get the right look and feel, but every resume should be written starting with a blank screen.