Having just posted here after a two-year hiatus, I found an incomplete draft post from October 2024 that I never published! Now that I’m here, I figured I might as well finish it and post it :)
Back then I’d done some recruiting for a website specialist role and, because I’m a data nerd and a typography nerd, I’d created these two graphics.
(As you would expect, all these charts show 2024 numbers which today might be completely different.)
Where they came from; what they sent
Three graphics. The first graphic is a bar chart titled ‘Recruitment source’ and it shows bars for Seek (60%); LinkedIn (24%); Internal, WoM, referral (6%); Indeed (5%); Our careers website (1%); GlassDoor (1%); and Other (1%). The second graphic is a pie chart titled ‘Documents included’ and the slices show 41% submitted only a resume while 59% submitted both a resume and a cover letter. The third graphic is two pie charts titled ‘Document formats’. One pie chart shows that, for the cover letter, 62% submitted a PDF while 38% submitted a Word doc. The second pie chart shows that, for the resume, 71% submitted a PDF while 29% submitted a Word doc.
What these stats tell us:
60% of applicants came from Seek, followed by 24% from LinkedIn
59% of applicants included a cover letter – which was lower than I expected
Most people (62-71%) attached their resumes and cover letters as PDFs, while the rest sent Word documents
What fonts they used
Two graphics and one block of text. The first graphic is two bar charts titled ‘Top 3 document fonts’. The first chart shows the top three resume fonts are Calibri and Arial (18%) followed by Cambria (7%). The second chart shows the top three cover letter fonts are, again, Calibri and Arial (18%) followed by Helvetica Neue (12%). The second graphic is a bar chart titled ‘Font sources’ and this shows bars for Bundled with OS (53%); Google Fonts (32%); and Other sources (16%). The block of text list the 19 fonts used from these font sources.
What these stats tell us:
The most frequently used fonts were Calibri, Arial, Cambria, and Helvetica Neue
Over half (53%) the applications used a font that came with their operating system or word processor (likely Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or Google Docs)
What fonts and formats do I use?
Graphic showing screenshots of two resumes for Ameel Khan, one from 2001 that uses the Tahome font and one from 2018 that uses the DIN Next LT font.
Between 1999 and 2017 I used Tahoma as my resume and cover letter font because it is highly legible, slightly narrow, and a default font in most operating systems. Then in 2018 I switched to using DIN Next LT for both documents. DIN is also highly legible and slightly narrow, plus it stands out from fonts that others might be using.
My preference is to submit PDF files, but if a Word document is required, I always embed DIN Next LT into that file.
What did I learn from collecting these stats?
Not much, really. None of this had any bearing on who I ended up hiring; this was just something I did because I found it interesting :)
That said, I did pay a smidge more attention to the applications of folks who put a little extra effort into their documents. I was hiring someone to manage my employer’s website, and if a candidate took the time to demonstrated their design and page-layout skills through the documents they submitted, I felt that warranted a few extra minutes of attention.