Your resume needs seven core sections: a header with your name, contact information, a professional summary, work experience, education, skills, and any optional sections like certifications or volunteer work that strengthen your candidacy. But knowing the section names is only half the battle. What you put inside each one, how you format the document, and how you tailor it to each job posting will determine whether your resume gets read by a human or filtered out by software.
Contact Information and Header
Start with your full name displayed prominently at the top, followed by your phone number, a professional email address, and your location (city and state is enough). If you have a LinkedIn profile, portfolio site, or personal website relevant to your field, add that link here. Skip your full street address. Do not include a photo if you’re applying in the U.S., as it’s unnecessary and can introduce bias into the process.
Professional Summary
Directly below your contact details, include a two to four sentence summary that captures your experience level, your core skills, and what you bring to the role. This is your pitch, not a personality description. Avoid generic filler phrases like “results-driven professional” or “dynamic team player.” These sound good and say nothing. Instead, write something specific to the type of work you do and the results you’ve delivered.
If you’re a recent graduate or changing careers, swap the summary for an objective statement. An objective focuses on your career goals and transferable skills rather than past experience. Either way, tailor this section to each job you apply for rather than using the same block of text everywhere.
Work Experience
This is the section hiring managers spend the most time on. List your roles in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent position. For each role, include your job title, the company name, your dates of employment, and three to six bullet points describing what you accomplished.
The most important shift to make here is writing about results, not responsibilities. “Responsible for managing a team” tells a recruiter what your job description said. “Led a 12-person sales team that exceeded quarterly targets by 18%” tells them what you actually did. Start each bullet point with a strong action verb like “launched,” “redesigned,” “reduced,” or “negotiated.” Phrases like “responsible for” and “worked on” signal that you’re listing tasks rather than demonstrating impact.
If you earned promotions or held multiple titles at the same company, list each role separately under that employer’s name. This makes your career progression visible at a glance.
Education
Include your degree, the institution’s name, and your field of study. If you graduated within the last few years, you can include the graduation date and relevant coursework or honors. If your degree is more than a decade old, consider leaving the graduation year off to avoid potential age bias. Recent graduates with limited work experience should move this section above work experience so their strongest credential appears first.
Skills That Actually Get Noticed
Your skills section serves two audiences: the applicant tracking system (ATS) that scans your resume before a human sees it, and the recruiter who skims it afterward. List a mix of hard skills (specific tools, software, technical abilities) and soft skills (communication, leadership, problem-solving) that match the job you’re targeting.
Three skill categories are in particularly strong demand right now. Communication skills, including active listening, stakeholder engagement, conflict resolution, and the ability to translate complex ideas into clear language for different audiences, matter across nearly every industry. Leadership skills have expanded beyond managing direct reports to include things like change management, workflow design, and coaching team performance. And entrepreneurial skills, like identifying inefficiencies, spotting opportunities for automation, and working independently toward outcomes, signal that you can think beyond your job description.
Avoid listing skills that are so broad they’re meaningless, like “Microsoft Office” without specifying which tools, or “communication” without context. Be specific, and prioritize the skills that appear most frequently in job postings for your target role.
Optional Sections Worth Adding
If you have certifications, major projects, publications, volunteer experience, or professional affiliations that support your candidacy, add them in a separate section after your skills. These are especially valuable when they fill a gap, like a certification that demonstrates expertise your work history doesn’t fully reflect, or volunteer leadership that shows management ability you haven’t yet had in a paid role. Only include optional sections when they genuinely strengthen your application. Padding your resume with irrelevant details dilutes the strong content.
How to Format for ATS and Humans
Most large and mid-sized employers use applicant tracking systems to screen resumes before a recruiter ever opens them. These systems are literal pattern-matchers, not intelligent readers. If a job posting asks for “project management” and your resume says “managed projects,” the ATS may not register it as a match. The same goes for specific tools: writing “CRM software” when the posting says “Salesforce” can make you invisible in the system.
To optimize for ATS without making your resume read like a keyword dump, try this process. Copy five job postings for the type of role you want. Highlight the technical terms and skill names that repeat across multiple listings. Then work those exact phrases into your resume naturally, within the context of your accomplishments and your skills section. This takes about 10 minutes per application and dramatically improves your chances of making it through the initial screen.
For formatting, keep the layout simple. Use a single-column design with standard section headings like “Work Experience,” “Education,” and “Skills.” Stick to clean fonts such as Calibri, Arial, or Aptos, with body text at 10 to 12 point and headings at 14 to 16 point. Avoid tables, multiple columns, graphics, or elaborate design elements. When hiring managers were asked which formats parse best in their systems, 53% favored text-based PDFs with no images and 43% preferred Word documents.
How Long Your Resume Should Be
If you’re a recent graduate or early in your career, keep it to one page. For mid-level and senior professionals, two pages is the standard ceiling. The only common exception is academic resumes, which often run three to five pages because they include publications, research, and teaching history. If you’re at the two-page mark and still cutting, prioritize the most recent and most relevant experience. A role you held 15 years ago in an unrelated field can usually be condensed to a single line or dropped entirely.
What to Leave Off
Some resume elements that were standard a decade ago now work against you. Drop the “References available upon request” line; employers assume this and it wastes space. Leave off personal details like your age, marital status, or hobbies unless a hobby directly relates to the job. Don’t include every job you’ve ever held if older roles aren’t relevant to your current career direction.
Most importantly, eliminate vague branding language. Summaries stuffed with words like “passionate,” “hardworking,” and “dedicated” without any supporting evidence read as filler. Every line on your resume should either state a fact, quantify a result, or name a specific skill. If a sentence could apply to anyone in any industry, rewrite it or remove it.