A CV has two readers and the first one is not a person. Most medium and large employers run applications through tracking software that extracts the text before anybody looks at it, and a document that parses badly is filtered out without being read. That constrains the typography more than taste does.
What actually breaks parsing
Not the choice of typeface, in most cases — the extraction reads the text layer, so any font with a proper character map works. What breaks it is everything around the type: text inside images, text in headers and footers, multi-column layouts read in the wrong order, and tables used for layout.
Where the font does matter is coverage. A face missing a character in your name, your address or an accented company name produces a gap or a substitution in the extracted text, and that is your name being wrong in their database.
So the requirements are narrow
- A complete character set — including accented capitals, because names are often set in title case.
- A clear distinction between the lowercase l, the capital I and the digit 1, since phone numbers and dates get read by a person too.
- Enough weights to build a hierarchy without underlining anything.
- Readable at 10 to 11 point on paper, because somebody may well print it.
Faces that meet all of that
Inter and Source Sans 3 are neutral, thoroughly drawn and unambiguous where it counts. IBM Plex Sans is the same reliability with slightly more character, which is useful in a design or engineering field. If a serif suits the field better, Source Serif 4 and Lora both hold up at CV sizes on paper and on screen.
| Family | Variable download | Static download |
|---|---|---|
| Inter | 957 KB2 files | 9.1 MB54 files |
| Source Sans 3 | 415 KB2 files | 2.0 MB16 files |
| IBM Plex Sans | 637 KB2 files | 4.8 MB42 files |
| Source Serif 4 | 989 KB2 files | 6.0 MB64 files |
| Lora | 224 KB2 files | 555 KB8 files |
The practical settings
- 10 to 11 point for body text, 14 to 16 for your name, and one step between for section headings.
- One typeface, two or three weights. Two typefaces is a design decision that has to earn itself; on a CV it rarely does.
- Left-aligned, not justified. Justification opens rivers of white space in a narrow column.
- One column for anything the software has to read. A sidebar is a second column and the parser may interleave it with the main text.
- Export as PDF with the fonts embedded, which is the default in every current word processor.
And the one that is not about software
Whoever reads it after the parser is reading their fortieth CV of the day. Generous line spacing and a clear hierarchy do more for you than any choice of typeface. The font should be invisible; the structure should not be.