How to write a resume: a complete step-by-step guide

What to put on a resume, and in what order

Before you think about designs or templates, decide what to put on your resume and in what order. Almost every effective resume, whether it belongs to a warehouse associate or a chief financial officer, shares the same skeleton; what changes is how much room each part gets. For most people with some work history, this order works:

1. Header: your name, a professional title and your contact information.
2. Professional summary: a short paragraph on what you do, at what level and what you bring.
3. Work experience, starting with your current or most recent job.
4. Education, plus any licenses and certifications the job calls for.
5. Skills: the technical and soft skills that matter for the role, and any languages you speak.
6. Optional sections: projects, volunteer work, awards, professional associations or publications, only when they’re relevant to the job.

There are two common exceptions. If you just finished school or your education carries more weight than your work history, move education above experience; our guide to the resume with no experience explains how. And if the job requires a specific license or credential (nursing, teaching, law, electrical work), make it visible in your professional title or the first line of your summary, as in “Registered Nurse (RN)” or “Licensed Journeyman Electrician,” even if the education section sits further down.

Contact information: what to include and what to leave off

The header is the easiest part of a resume, and still the place where the most avoidable mistakes show up. Include only what helps an employer identify you and get in touch:

• Your name, the way you want to be addressed during the hiring process. If you go by a shortened first name or your middle name, use it.
• One phone number, usually your cell, written like (512) 555-0142, with a voicemail greeting you wouldn’t mind a recruiter hearing.
• A professional email address, ideally based on your name: jordan.ellis@… beats a nickname from high school. Don’t use your current work email.
• Your location: city and state are enough (Columbus, OH), with no street address. If you’re moving, say so: “Columbus, OH (relocating to Denver, CO, in January).”
• LinkedIn, portfolio or personal website, only if they’re up to date and tell the same story as your resume. A customized LinkedIn URL looks cleaner than the default one.

If the job involves driving or traveling between sites, mention a valid driver’s license too, in your skills or certifications rather than in the header.

What to leave off

A US resume doesn’t include personal details that have nothing to do with your ability to do the job. Leave these out:

• Your date of birth or age: it says nothing about your work and can open the door to bias.
• Marital status, children, religion, health information, height or weight.
• Your Social Security number or driver’s license number. The employer will ask for what it needs when it hires you, and putting them on a document you send around is an identity theft risk.
• Your full street address: city and state are enough.
• Citizenship or visa details. If your work authorization might be in question, for example because your education or experience is from another country, a short line such as “Authorized to work in the US” is all you need.

Should you include a photo?

No. In the US, as in Canada and the UK, resumes don’t include a photo. Recruiters don’t expect one, it takes up space without saying anything about your work, and some employers prefer not to receive one so it can’t influence a hiring decision. The exceptions are acting, modeling and some on-camera jobs, where you send a headshot separately. If you’re applying in a country where a photo or a longer document is the norm, see our guide to the CV vs. resume.

Professional title and summary: the first lines recruiters read

Right under your name goes your professional title, also called a resume headline: one line that says what you do. It replaces the word “Resume” at the top of the page, which tells the reader nothing new, since they already know what they’re looking at.

You can adjust your title for each job as long as it’s true. If your official title was “office assistant” but you handled all the billing, and the posting is for a “billing specialist,” you can use that title at the top of your resume. In the experience section, though, keep the title you actually held, since employers often verify it, and add a clarifier if it helps: “Office Assistant (Billing and Collections).” What you shouldn’t do is inflate your level, going from coordinator to manager or from junior to senior without having held that role.

The professional summary

Under the header, a paragraph of three or four sentences (50 to 100 words) sums up who you are professionally. A structure that works: what you do and how much experience you have, what you’re best at, with some proof, and what you bring or what you’re looking for, tied to the job.

Avoid summaries that could belong to anyone (“hardworking, detail-oriented team player eager to learn”). You’ll find a step-by-step formula, before-and-after rewrites and more than 30 examples by industry and career stage in our guide to resume summary examples.

Work experience: reverse-chronological order and results

This is the most-read section of your resume and the one that deserves the most work. List your jobs in reverse-chronological order: your current or most recent job first, then back from there. For each one, include:

• Job title, in the most recognizable form for your field.
• Employer, city and state. If the company isn’t well known, add a few words about what it does: “Harbor Point Hotels, a group of four boutique hotels.”
• Start and end dates with month and year (Mar 2022 — Present). Years alone raise questions: 2023 to 2024 could mean two months or almost two years.
• Three to five bullet points for recent, relevant jobs; one or two for older ones.

Achievements, not just duties

Duties tell the reader what you were assigned; achievements show how well you did it and what changed because of you. A useful formula for each bullet: action verb + what you did + context or result (volume, frequency, improvement, recognition).

Numbers help, but only if they’re real and you can explain them in an interview. If you don’t have exact figures, context counts too: team size, type of customers, tools, responsibilities you took on sooner than expected. Describe your current job in the present tense and past jobs in the past tense, and swap “responsible for” and “duties included” for verbs like managed, coordinated, reduced, launched, trained, negotiated, resolved, prepared, supervised, redesigned, automated.

Special cases

• Lots of short-term jobs: group similar ones in a single entry (“Seasonal Server, Cape Cod restaurants, 2019 — 2022”) and go into detail only on the most relevant.
• Freelance, contract and gig work: list it like any other job, with the types of clients or a few representative projects. If you signed a confidentiality agreement, describe the industry without naming the client. For temp assignments through a staffing agency, name both the agency and the client company.
• Employment gaps: one line is enough if the gap was for school, caregiving, health, a move or a personal project. You don’t owe anyone a detailed explanation.
• A long career: go into detail on the last 10 to 15 years and sum up anything earlier in a single “Earlier experience” line.

Our resume examples by job include ready-made bullets for every field, from server to software engineer.

Education, licenses and certifications

List your education from most recent to oldest, with the exact name of the degree, the school, its city and state, and your graduation year (or “Expected May 2027” if you’re still in school). A few guidelines:

• Once you have a college degree, you can drop your high school. If a high school diploma or GED is your highest level of education, include it.
• Include your GPA only if it’s strong (3.5 or higher is a common rule of thumb) and you graduated recently, or if the employer asks for it. Honors like cum laude or the Dean’s List are worth a mention too.
• A capstone project, thesis or relevant coursework deserves a line when it’s related to the job.
• For licenses and certifications, give the full name, the issuing body or state and the year: “ServSafe Food Protection Manager, 2025” or “OSHA 10-Hour Construction, 2024.” If the job requires a license (RN, CDL, journeyman electrician, teaching certificate, CPA), give it a section of its own near the top so no one has to hunt for it.
• For courses and professional development, include the ones related to the job, with the provider and year. A two-hour course that has nothing to do with the role doesn’t add anything.
• If your degree is from outside the US, you can add its US equivalent from a credential evaluation: “Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Lima, Peru (evaluated as equivalent to a US bachelor’s degree).”
• If you have a long career, you can leave off graduation years from more than 10 to 15 years ago.

Skills: a short, specific list you can prove

The skills section works as a quick summary of what you can do and, in online applications, as a source of keywords. There are two kinds:

• Hard skills: knowledge and tools that can be tested. For example, Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP), QuickBooks, SAP, AutoCAD, Epic EHR, SQL, forklift operation or point-of-sale systems.
• Soft skills: how you work and deal with people. Communication, organization, negotiation, conflict resolution, team leadership.

Usually, 6 to 12 skills are enough; if you have more, group them into categories (tools, methods, certifications). Put first the ones the posting asks for and that you can prove. And the more specific, the better: “Excel” says little; “Excel: pivot tables, XLOOKUP and basic macros” says a lot.

Languages belong here too, or in a section of their own if you speak several. Give each one a plain-English level: native, fluent, professional working proficiency or conversational. Being bilingual is a real plus in healthcare, customer service, education and many other fields, so don’t leave it out, but be honest: if you write “fluent,” expect part of the interview to happen in that language.

Soft skills are convincing when they show up in your experience, not when you list them. Our guide to skills for your resume has lists by field and shows how to prove each one.

Chronological, functional or combination: which resume format to use

The format determines how you organize your experience. There are three main options, and they serve different purposes:

When in doubt, go reverse-chronological. It’s the easiest to read, the one applicant tracking systems handle best and the one most resume templates are built around. A combination resume is the best alternative when your recent experience doesn’t look like the job you want.

How long should a resume be: one page or two?

There’s no universal rule, but there is a useful test: every line has to earn its place. In practice:

• One page if you’re starting out, have less than about 10 years of experience or your relevant history fits without cramming.
• Two pages if you have a long career related to the job, or a technical background with projects, certifications and tools the hiring manager needs to see.
• More than two only in specific contexts, such as an academic CV with publications, research and teaching, which is a different document from a resume (see our guide to the CV vs. resume).

If you have half a page to spare, don’t fill it with generic hobbies; if you’re short on space, cut content before you shrink the margins or the font. The first things to go are usually details of jobs from more than 15 years ago, courses unrelated to the job, obvious skills (“Microsoft Word,” “email,” “internet”), an objective statement that repeats your summary and the line “References available upon request.” A second page that’s half full is fine; one with just two lines of interests is not.

Design and readability

Good design goes unnoticed: it simply makes the content effortless to read. These guidelines work in almost any field:

• A readable font, with body text between 10 and 12 points and your name clearly larger.
• Margins between 0.5 and 1 inch, and space between sections: white space organizes too.
• One or two fonts at most and a single accent color, used sparingly.
• Standard section headings (“Experience,” “Education,” “Skills”) so readers find things right away.
• Dates, job titles and employers always in the same position and the same format.
• Bullets of one or two lines instead of long paragraphs.

• Text inside images, or contact details shown only as icons.
• Skill-level graphics, full-page dark backgrounds or decorative fonts.
• Complex tables or several narrow columns if you’re applying through job sites, which sometimes read the text in the wrong order.

Creative fields like graphic design leave room for more visual personality, but readability still comes first: your portfolio is the place to show off.

Make your resume readable for applicant tracking systems

When you apply online, your resume usually lands in an applicant tracking system (ATS): software that stores applications, pulls the text of your resume into fields and lets recruiters search and sort candidates by keywords. If it can’t read your resume properly, or your resume doesn’t use the words recruiters search for, you’re harder to find. To stay readable:

• Send a file with real, selectable text, never a scanned image or a photo of a printed page.
• Use standard section headings and a simple layout; single-column designs are the safest.
• Use the posting’s own terms when they truthfully describe you: if it says “accounts payable,” don’t write only “AP.” Spell out acronyms once: “Certified Public Accountant (CPA).”
• Keep your dates in one consistent format, and write your contact details out as text instead of relying on icons.
• Answer the application form carefully: questions about licenses, availability or work authorization can screen applicants out before anyone reads the resume.

Our guide to the ATS-friendly resume goes deeper into what these systems read well and what trips them up.

How to tailor your resume to each job

Sending the same document to every job is convenient, but it rarely works. Tailoring doesn’t mean rewriting your resume every time; it means adjusting what matters most. A quick method:

1. Read the posting and sort the requirements: the must-haves (degree, years of experience, licenses, tools, languages) and the nice-to-haves, often listed as “preferred.”
2. Note how the company names tasks and tools. If it says “customer support” and you wrote “client services,” or “people operations” where you wrote “human resources,” use its term when the two mean the same thing.
3. Adjust your title and summary so they answer what the employer is looking for.
4. Reorder the bullets under each job: the ones that prove the posting’s requirements go first.
5. Review your skills: remove the ones that don’t apply and make sure the ones the posting asks for, if you have them, appear under the same name.

Keep a complete master resume and build each tailored version from it. And don’t claim requirements you don’t meet: if the posting asks for SAP and you’ve used Oracle NetSuite, say which system and which modules. It’s honest, and it suggests you’ll learn quickly.

Mi Resumen’s job match check compares your resume with a job posting you paste in and separates the requirements you already show from the ones you can’t back up yet; the AI assistant can then tailor your summary and bullets to that posting without adding anything you don’t have. You review every suggestion before applying it. To round out your application, add a cover letter written for that company.

Save it as a PDF and name the file

Unless the posting asks for another format, send your resume as a PDF: it looks the same on every device and doesn’t shift around when someone opens it on another computer. Before you send it, check three things:

1. The text is real and selectable, not a scanned image. Open the PDF, select a sentence and search for it with Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac): if your PDF reader can’t find it, an applicant tracking system can’t read it either.
2. The links work: LinkedIn, portfolio, personal website.
3. The file name is professional: Megan-Walsh-Resume-Payroll-Specialist.pdf instead of resume_final_v3.pdf. Hyphens are safer than spaces or special characters, which some systems garble.

Mi Resumen exports straight to PDF with real, selectable text, and you can publish the same resume as a personal website at your own address (yourname.miresumen.com), which is handy to link from LinkedIn or your email signature.

If the company uses its own application form, fill it out completely even if you attach your PDF: recruiters often filter candidates by those fields.

Proofread and avoid the most common mistakes

Almost none of these mistakes have anything to do with your experience, and a careful proofread catches most of them. Read your resume out loud, run a spelling and grammar check, look at it on your phone as well as your computer, and ask someone else to read it with fresh eyes. Then look for these:

• Typos and spelling mistakes, including in company names, software names and your own email address.
• Putting “Resume” at the top instead of your name and professional title.
• Copying your job description into your experience: “performed other duties as assigned” says nothing about you.
• Blocks of text: eight lines where three bullets would do.
• Dates that don’t match between your resume, your LinkedIn profile, what you say in the interview and what a background check turns up.
• Exaggerating or making things up: degrees, titles, language skills or responsibilities. They’re easier to check than you might think, and a single false detail undermines everything else.
• Adjectives with nothing behind them: “dynamic, proactive, results-driven” without a single example to back them up.
• Personal details nobody asked for, or an unprofessional email address.
• Mixing tenses, or switching between sentences with “I” and bullets that start with a verb.
• Not tailoring anything: the same document for a warehouse job and an office job.

Final checklist before you send your resume

Go through this list with the final PDF open, not the draft:

• Your name, professional title, phone number and email address are correct.
• There are no personal details nobody asked for (photo, date of birth, Social Security number, marital status, street address).
• Your summary is three or four sentences long and mentions the role or field you’re applying for.
• Your experience is in reverse-chronological order, with month and year on every date.
• Each recent job has at least one result, not just duties.
• The key terms from the posting that you meet appear the way the employer writes them.
• Any languages you list include a level.
• It’s one or two pages long, and the second page, if there is one, has real content.
• Fonts, dates and bullets follow the same format throughout.
• The text can be selected and the links work.
• The file name includes your name and the job title.
• Someone you trust has read it looking for typos.

To see all of this applied to a real case, open the example for your field in our resume examples: administrative assistant, registered nurse, retail sales associate, warehouse worker and many more.

Frequently asked questions