What is readability?
Readability relates to how easy it is to read and understand a text, depending on its unique characteristics. Readability is generally measured utilizing metrics such as the number of syllables in words and the number of words in a sentence to calculate a level of readability score.
Why is readability important?
Readability increases your target audience's chance to read and interact with the content you publish.
Consistency is an effective method of writing continuous readability. Consistency in the hierarchy is necessary for a reader-friendly content structure. An easy to follow content structure will enhance resume readability. The readability of the resume document itself is as vital as the content within it.
Although most ATS Robots will parse a resume in seconds without consideration for readability or legibility, but still, in the end, an individual such as a recruiter or a recruiting manager will have to read resumes rated as potential qualifiers for the position.
A recruiter or a hiring manager might find a resume hard to read and simply put it aside because it was difficult to read and consider it not to match the expectations for suitability for the job position.
Do not be one of those applicants whose resume gets scraped because you didn't consider the document's overall readability and layout.
Readability vs Legibility
Readability is about how easily you can read words or a document as a whole. Factors like the number of words in a sentence, sentence length, syllable density and word length influence how easy or hard it is to read a document. Readability is calculated by collecting these metrics and then using a specific mathematical formula to determine the result presented as a value. There are numerous formulas that linguists have developed over the years, such as Flesch Reading Ease Score, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, Automated Readability Index and many others.
MyResumerating uses Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score 0-100, one of the most widely used formulae to determine document readability.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score Scales:
- 90-100 very easy to read, easily understood
- 80-90 easy to read
- 70-80 fairly easy to read
- 60-70 easily understood
- 50-60 fairly difficult to read
- 30-50 difficult to read
- 0-30 very difficult to read
Legibility is about how easily a person can recognize, identify, and read characters in a block of text. Typography governs legibility. Typography is the technique of making a written language clear, readable and appealing when displayed. Clarity is achieved by selecting easily legible typefaces, font sizes, line lengths, line height, and letter-spacing, space between pairs of letters and whitespace. Other factors that affect legibility are document structure, hierarchy, margins, and contrast.