How to write a resume — a step-by-step guide
Writing a resume is a specific kind of writing. It is not a biography, an essay, or a cover letter. It is a compact argument for why you should be invited to an interview. This guide walks through every section with worked examples.
Start with contact details
At the top of the resume: your name, a professional headline, and the contact details a recruiter needs. That usually means email, phone, and location. Add a personal website, LinkedIn, or GitHub if they contain work the recruiter will want to see.
Use an email address that is professional. Your full name at a common provider is safest. Avoid nicknames, jokes, or anything that would look out of place on a business card.
Write a short professional summary
The summary is optional. Use it when it adds something the rest of the resume does not. A good summary states the type of role you are targeting, gives one or two signals of relevant experience, and adds a detail that is not obvious from the experience section.
Do not write "Passionate professional with excellent communication skills." That sentence describes everyone and commits to nothing. Write a specific sentence about what you do and how.
Weak: "Experienced product manager seeking a new opportunity in a fast-paced environment."
Strong: "Product manager with six years of experience in B2B SaaS. Led the rollout of a customer analytics tool used by roughly 1,500 accounts."
Order work experience for impact
Work experience goes in reverse-chronological order — most recent first. For each role, list the company, your title, the location, and the dates. Use month and year, not just year, unless you are hiding a short tenure.
For each role, write two to four bullets. Start each bullet with a strong verb. Describe what you did and what it produced. Where you can, include a number, a range, or an observable outcome.
Weak: "Responsible for managing social media accounts."
Strong: "Grew the company's LinkedIn followers from roughly 2,000 to 8,000 over nine months by publishing weekly articles on platform engineering."
The strong version is longer but it tells the reader what happened. If you do not have metrics, describe observable outcomes. "Became the primary point of contact for escalations in the support team" is an outcome that does not require a number.
Include education with relevant detail
Education goes below experience for candidates with more than two or three years of experience, and above experience for early-career candidates. List the degree, the institution, the location, and the graduation date.
For recent graduates, add relevant coursework, honours, or a brief description of a capstone project. Keep it to a few lines. Do not list every course you have ever taken.
List skills concisely
The skills section is a short list — eight to fifteen items — of tools and technologies that are genuinely relevant to the role. Do not pad this section with skills you would not want to be interviewed about.
Group related skills where it helps readability. "Programming: Python, JavaScript, Go" reads better than an unstructured list of thirty languages.
Add optional sections when they help
Certifications and licenses are essential in regulated fields (healthcare, law, finance, education, trades). Include the certification name, the issuing body, and the date.
Languages are useful for roles that require them, and for international applications. Include the language and your proficiency level using a standard scale (CEFR A1–C2, or a plain description such as "fluent", "conversational", "basic").
Projects are useful for technical candidates, students, and career changers. Describe what you built, what technologies you used, and what the project produced.
Volunteer experience can substitute for paid experience in early-career resumes. Treat it with the same structure as paid work.
Interests and hobbies are optional and only worth including when they are specific and relevant. "Reading, travel, cooking" is generic. "Long-distance running, including one marathon in 2024" is specific.
Format for readability and parsing
Use a clean single-column layout. Standard section headings. A readable serif or sans-serif font between 10 and 12 points. A page margin of 15 to 20 millimetres. Enough spacing that the reader's eye can move down the page without effort.
Avoid tables, text boxes, columns, and images with embedded text. These break most parsers and confuse many human readers. If you want a two-column layout, use it only for supporting sections (skills, languages) and keep the main experience column full-width.
Export as PDF with selectable text. If you can select the text in your PDF and copy it, most applicant tracking systems will read it correctly. If you cannot, they may not.
Review before you apply
Read the resume out loud. Every sentence that sounds awkward when spoken will read awkwardly on the page. Cut anything that does not add information.
Ask a friend or colleague to skim the resume for thirty seconds and tell you what they remember. If they cannot remember what kind of role you are targeting, the summary is not doing its job.
Match the resume to the specific role. Adjust the summary, reorder the bullets within a role, and reorder the sections themselves if a different order tells a better story for that job.