Your resume will act as your first impression to recruiters in your job search, so it needs to be good if you hope to impress.
This means that not only do you need to get the content right, but you also need to format your resume effectively to provide an easy reading experience.
And if you want to tidy up the page – right aligning your dates can be a great tactic
But if you’re not sure how to do this, you’ve come to the right place.
Below, we’ll show you how you can easily right align your dates step-by-step in Word or Google Docs
Here’s how to align your dates using Microsoft Word:
If you’re using Google Docs instead of Word, right aligning your dates can be done a little differently. Simply follow the steps below:
There are several reasons you might want to right-align your dates on your resume. Firstly, it helps your resume to look clean and helps improve readability, making it easier for the recruiter to skim through and take in the most important information.
Secondly, right aligning your dates puts the dates out of the recruiters view slightly, allowing you to highlight company name and your job title (which will be more important to them)
No, you don’t have to right-align your dates, it’s not a hard rule that has been set out by recruiters. However, for the reasons we’ve outlined above it can be more beneficial.
That being said, it really depends on the layout of your resume and if you wanted to place more emphasis on the dates. For example, if you’ve been at a job a really long time and want to highlight your dedication to the company you might left-align your dates instead.
As well as getting your alignment right, you also need to make sure you choose the correct format for your dates. While some will try to remember the exact day they started their jobs, others might try to disguise employment gaps by only including the years.
However, the correct way to format your dates is by including just the month and year you started and ended your employment.
You can include the full name of the month, but for longer months you may wish to abbreviate to the first few letters, for example, Aug or Sept.