A strong resume gets you interviews by showing, in one or two pages, that your skills and experience match what a specific employer needs. The process comes down to choosing the right structure, writing results-focused descriptions of your work, and formatting the document so both humans and software can read it easily. Here’s how to build one from scratch.
Pick the Right Resume Format
Three formats cover nearly every situation, and each one reorders the same core sections to emphasize different strengths.
- Chronological: Lists work experience first, with your most recent job at the top. This is the default choice for anyone with a steady work history in their target field. Most hiring managers expect it.
- Functional: Leads with a skills section and pushes work history lower. This works if you’re changing careers or have significant gaps in employment, because it highlights transferable abilities over job titles.
- Combination: Opens with a summary and a skills or qualifications section, then follows with work experience. It suits mid-career professionals who want to showcase both a deep skill set and a solid job history.
If you’re unsure, go chronological. It’s the most familiar format to recruiters, and applicant tracking systems (the software that scans resumes before a human sees them) parse it most reliably.
The Five Sections Every Resume Needs
Contact Information
Put your full name, phone number, email address, and city at the top. Add a LinkedIn profile URL if yours is up to date. Skip your full street address; city and state are enough. Use a professional email, not a novelty handle from college.
Summary or Objective
A resume summary is two to three sentences that describe your experience level, core strengths, and the type of value you bring. Use a summary when you have relevant work history. If you’re entering the workforce or pivoting to a new field, swap it for an objective statement that names the role you’re targeting and what you offer.
Either way, keep it tight. A summary like “Operations manager with six years of experience reducing warehouse costs and leading teams of 20+” tells a hiring manager immediately whether to keep reading.
Work Experience
For each role, list the job title, company name, location, and dates of employment. Below that, add three to six bullet points describing what you did and what resulted from it. This section carries the most weight, so it gets the most space on the page. More on writing effective bullets below.
Skills
Create a clean list of hard skills (software, tools, certifications, languages, technical methods) relevant to the jobs you’re applying for. Soft skills like “communication” or “teamwork” are better demonstrated inside your experience bullets than listed on their own. Order your skills so the most relevant ones appear first.
Education
List your degree, school name, and graduation year. If you graduated within the last few years, you can include GPA, honors, or relevant coursework. Once you have several years of work experience, education moves to the bottom and doesn’t need much detail.
Optional Sections Worth Adding
If you have room and the content is relevant, consider adding sections for certifications or licenses, awards, volunteer work, languages, or professional affiliations. A nursing candidate benefits from a certifications section. A candidate fluent in three languages applying to a global company should list them. The test is simple: does this information make a hiring manager more likely to call you? If not, leave it off and keep the resume focused.
Write Bullets That Show Results
The biggest difference between a weak resume and a strong one is how you describe your work. Most people default to listing duties: “Responsible for managing social media accounts.” That tells the reader what your job was, not how well you did it.
A better approach uses an action-project-result framework. Start with a strong action verb, name the project or problem, then describe the outcome with a number when possible. Yale’s Office of Career Strategy breaks this into a formula: accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Weak: Managed email marketing campaigns for the sales team.
- Strong: Increased email open rates by 22% over six months by redesigning subject lines and segmenting the subscriber list by purchase history.
Not every bullet needs a percentage or dollar figure. When you can’t quantify, be specific about scope: how many people you managed, how many clients you served, how large the budget was, or how tight the deadline was. Specifics build credibility even without a formal metric.
Start every bullet with a different action verb. “Led,” “built,” “reduced,” “designed,” “trained,” “negotiated,” and “launched” all paint clearer pictures than “responsible for” or “helped with.”
Tailor Your Resume to Each Job
Sending the same generic resume to every opening is the most common reason qualified candidates don’t hear back. Applicant tracking systems rank resumes by how closely they match the job posting’s language, and hiring managers scan for the same alignment.
A practical method that takes about ten minutes: copy five job postings for your target role, highlight the technical terms and skills that appear repeatedly, and count which ones show up most often. Then update your resume to mirror that language. If postings consistently say “financial modeling” and your resume says “spreadsheet analysis,” change it. Use their exact phrasing, not your paraphrase.
Don’t just drop keywords into your skills list. Modern tracking systems use semantic matching, which means they look for context around a keyword, not just the keyword itself. If “project management” is critical to the role, it should appear in your skills section and inside at least one or two experience bullets that show you actually doing it with a measurable outcome.
Reorder your skills section so the most frequently requested abilities appear at the top. If Python shows up five times in the posting and Excel shows up once, Python belongs higher on your list. Relevance hierarchy matters to both software and human readers.
Format for Humans and Software
A resume that looks beautiful but can’t be parsed by an applicant tracking system may never reach a hiring manager. In a survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers conducted by Resume Genius, 53% said text-based PDFs with no images work best in their systems, and 43% preferred Word documents (.docx). Unless the application specifically requests another format, submit one of those two.
Stick to a single-column layout. Tables, multiple columns, text boxes, and graphics confuse many tracking systems and can scramble your information. Use standard section headings like “Work Experience,” “Skills,” and “Education” so the software can categorize your content correctly.
For fonts, choose something clean and professional: Arial, Calibri, Garamond, or similar. Set the body text to 10 to 12 point and section headings to 14 to 16 point. Use consistent spacing between sections, and leave enough white space so the page doesn’t feel cramped. A hiring manager may spend only a few seconds on an initial scan, so visual clarity matters as much as content.
Keep the resume to one page if you have fewer than ten years of experience. Two pages are fine for senior professionals with extensive, relevant history. Three pages are almost never necessary.
Before You Submit
Proofread twice, ideally with a day between drafts. Typos and inconsistent formatting signal carelessness, and they’re the easiest problems to fix. Read each bullet out loud to catch awkward phrasing. Check that your dates are accurate and your job titles match what a former employer would confirm.
Save the file with a clear name like “Jane-Smith-Resume.pdf” rather than “resume_final_v3.” It’s a small detail, but it makes you easier to find in a recruiter’s downloads folder. Then open the saved file on a different device to make sure the formatting held. What looks perfect in your word processor can shift when opened elsewhere.