A strong resume gets you interviews by showing employers, in one or two pages, that your skills and experience match what they need. Building one from scratch or updating an old version comes down to choosing the right format, writing each section with specific details, and making sure the file actually gets read by the software companies use to screen applicants. Here’s how to do all three.
Pick the Right Format
There are three standard resume layouts, and the best one depends on where you are in your career.
- Chronological: Lists your work experience in reverse order, most recent job first. This is the most widely used format and works best if you have a steady work history in one industry or a clear pattern of career growth. Fields like finance, law, education, and healthcare tend to expect this layout.
- Functional: Organized by skill categories rather than job timeline. Each section highlights a specific area of expertise and the accomplishments that prove it. This format works well if you’re changing careers, have gaps in employment, or have done mostly freelance or contract work where job titles and dates don’t tell the full story.
- Hybrid: Starts with a skills section that highlights your key qualifications, then follows with a chronological work history. This is the most versatile option and works at any career stage, especially if you have a broad range of skills across multiple areas.
If you’re unsure, start with the chronological format. It’s what most hiring managers expect, and applicant tracking systems (the software that scans your resume before a human sees it) parse it most reliably.
Set Up Your Contact Information
Put your full name, email address, phone number, city and state, and LinkedIn URL at the top of the page. Place this information in the main body of the document rather than in a header or footer, because applicant tracking systems sometimes can’t read content stored in headers. You don’t need to include a full street address, and in most industries a photo is unnecessary and can actually work against you in automated screening.
Write a Summary That Matches the Job
Below your contact info, add two to three sentences that frame who you are professionally. This isn’t a generic objective statement like “seeking a challenging role.” It’s a snapshot of your experience level, your strongest relevant skills, and what you bring to the specific type of role you’re applying for.
A customer service professional might write: “Customer support specialist with four years of experience resolving technical issues for SaaS products. Consistently maintained a 96% satisfaction rating while handling 60+ tickets per day.” That tells a hiring manager exactly what you do, how well you do it, and at what scale.
Turn Job Duties Into Measurable Results
The work experience section is the core of your resume, and most people write it wrong. Listing what you were responsible for doesn’t help. Showing what you actually accomplished does. Strong resume bullets follow a simple formula: action verb, plus result, plus a number.
Compare these two versions of the same bullet point:
- Weak: Responsible for increasing sales in the Northeast territory.
- Strong: Increased sales by 35% over six months, generating $2.3 million in additional revenue.
The second version gives specific, verifiable information. That’s what hiring managers remember. Here are more examples of how to quantify different types of work:
- Budget management: “Managed $2M annual budget” or “Reduced expenses by 15% while maintaining service quality.”
- Leadership: “Supervised 12-person team” or “Coordinated projects across five departments.”
- Operations: “Processed 500+ applications weekly” or “Maintained 99.8% accuracy rate on 10,000+ transactions.”
- Benchmarks: “Exceeded sales targets by 120%” or “Performed 15% above industry average.”
Use percentages to show improvement, even when the absolute numbers are small. “Increased customer retention by 40%” carries more weight than “retained 20 additional customers monthly.” Place the most important numbers at the beginning of each bullet point so they’re easy to spot during a quick scan.
For each job, list the company name, your title, the dates you worked there, and three to six bullet points. Start with your most recent position and work backward. You generally don’t need to go back more than 10 to 15 years unless earlier experience is directly relevant.
Add Skills and Education
Include a skills section that lists your relevant hard skills (software, tools, certifications, technical abilities) and key soft skills (project management, client relations, team leadership). Keep it to a clean list rather than rating yourself on a scale. Self-assessed skill bars don’t mean anything to employers and can cause formatting problems in automated systems.
For education, list your degree, the institution, and your graduation year. If you graduated more than a few years ago, you can drop the year. Recent graduates with limited work experience can place the education section higher on the page and include relevant coursework, academic projects, or honors. Once you have a few years of professional experience, education moves below work history.
Format for Applicant Tracking Systems
Most mid-size and large companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter resumes before a recruiter ever reads them. If your formatting confuses the software, your resume gets lost regardless of how qualified you are. A few technical rules make the difference.
Stick to simple formatting. Avoid tables, columns, graphics, text boxes, and icons. Anything inside a text box may be read as an image and ignored entirely. Use a single-column layout with consistent font sizes and a standard font like Arial or Calibri. Set margins at roughly two centimeters (about three-quarters of an inch) on each side.
Save your file as a Word document (.docx) unless the job posting specifically asks for a PDF. PDFs can be misread by some ATS platforms. Name the file something professional and clear, like “Jane-Smith-Resume.docx.”
Use standard section headings that the software expects: “Work Experience,” “Education,” “Skills,” “Summary.” Creative headings like “Where I’ve Made an Impact” may look nice but can confuse automated parsers.
Tailor Every Application
Sending the same resume to every job is the single biggest reason people don’t get callbacks. Each job posting tells you exactly what the employer wants. Your resume needs to reflect those priorities, using the same language the posting uses.
Read the job description and pull out the key skills, qualifications, and attributes it mentions. Look for both hard skills (specific tools, certifications, technical expertise) and soft skills (communication, leadership, problem-solving). Then adjust your summary, skills section, and bullet points to mirror that language. If the posting says “stakeholder management” and your resume says “working with clients,” change your wording to match. ATS software scans for keyword alignment, and hiring managers do the same thing mentally.
You don’t need to rewrite your resume from zero for every application. Build a strong base version, then swap in relevant keywords and reorder your bullet points so the most relevant accomplishments appear first.
Using AI to Speed Up Tailoring
AI tools like ChatGPT can cut the tailoring process from 30 minutes to 10. The most effective approach is iterative: don’t just paste everything in and hope for a perfect result.
Start by pasting the job description and your full resume into the tool. Ask it to analyze how well your resume aligns with the role and where the gaps are. Then go section by section. Paste your summary and ask for improvements based on the job description. Do the same for your skills section and each work experience entry. This section-by-section approach produces much more useful feedback than a single high-level review.
Pay attention to the keywords the AI identifies from the job posting. These are the terms you want naturally woven into your resume. But don’t blindly accept every suggestion. AI doesn’t know your actual experience, and a resume filled with skills you can’t demonstrate in an interview will backfire. Use it as an editing partner, not a ghostwriter.
Final Checks Before Submitting
Print your resume or view it at full size on screen. Check that it’s easy to scan in about six seconds, because that’s roughly how long a recruiter spends on an initial look. Your name, current title, and most impressive accomplishments should jump off the page.
Read every bullet point out loud. If a sentence sounds vague or could apply to anyone, rewrite it with a specific number or outcome. Proofread for typos, inconsistent formatting, and mismatched dates. Have someone else read it too, since you’ll often miss errors in your own writing.
For most professionals, keep the resume to one page. If you have more than 10 years of relevant experience or work in an industry where longer resumes are standard (academia, federal government, some technical fields), two pages is appropriate. Anything beyond that needs a strong justification.