How to write a resume

Most people open a blank document and start typing from memory. That is why most resumes read like job descriptions. Spend twenty minutes collecting the raw material first; the writing gets much faster.

• Three to five job posts for the role you want. Highlight the skills and phrases that repeat. Those are what the recruiter screens for.
• Your old resume and LinkedIn profile, even if they are out of date. Dates, titles and company names are tedious to rebuild.
• Appraisals, performance reviews and appreciation emails. These are full of results you have forgotten: targets met, projects shipped, praise from clients.
• Numbers from your work: team size, budget, number of customers or tickets, revenue, time saved, error rates, rankings. Rough is fine; you will tidy them later.

Write down what changed because you were there, not just what you did. “Handled vendor payments” is a duty. “Cleared a 3-month backlog of vendor payments in 5 weeks” is a result.

For almost everyone, the right choice is the reverse-chronological format: your most recent job first, then the one before, and so on. Recruiters expect it and applicant tracking systems (ATS) read it most reliably. The functional and combination formats have narrow uses, which we compare in our resume format guide.

Then pick a layout. If you will apply through job portals or company career sites, use a single-column template with standard headings: see our ATS resume templates. If you are mostly emailing hiring managers or applying in design or marketing, a modern or two column design is fine.

Paper size matters more than people think. Use US Letter for the United States and Canada; use A4 for the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia, India, the Gulf and most of Asia. A Letter resume printed on A4 loses its bottom lines.

Put your name at the top in a larger size, then one or two lines of contact details. Include:

• Phone number, with the country code if you're applying to another country: (312) 555-0148 at home, +1 312 555 0148 abroad.
• A professional email address: firstname.lastname@gmail.com, not a nickname from college.
• City and country (or city and state). No full street address; nobody posts letters anymore and it is a privacy risk.
• LinkedIn URL, cleaned up to linkedin.com/in/yourname. Add GitHub, Behance or a portfolio only if it shows relevant work.

Leave out date of birth, marital status, religion, father's name, gender, passport number and a signature. They were common on old-style resumes (and the Indian “biodata”) and add nothing for the employer; in the US, employers would rather not see them at all. A photo is expected in some countries (Germany, parts of the Gulf) but should be left off for the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and is optional in India.

The summary is two or three lines under your name that say who you are professionally and why you fit. It replaces the old “Objective” (“seeking a challenging position…”), which talked about what you want instead of what you offer.

A reliable formula: job title + years of experience + two or three skills from the job post + one result you are known for.

New graduates can write one too, built on degree, projects and internships instead of years. Our guide to resume summary examples has 20+ to adapt, and the free resume summary generator writes three drafts from your job title and skills.

This is the section recruiters actually read. For each job, give the title, company, city and dates (month and year), then bullet points. Put the job title first if it is more impressive than the company, and the company first if the brand is the stronger signal.

Each bullet should answer: what did you do, how, and what happened as a result? Start with a strong verb (led, built, cut, launched, negotiated, trained), never with “Responsible for”.

How many bullets? Three to six for your current or most recent job, two to four for the one before, one or two for anything older than ten years. Older jobs can collapse into a single line: “Earlier roles: Sales Executive, HDFC Bank (2012–2015)”.

When you don't have numbers

Not every job has a dashboard. Use scale (how many people, accounts, sites), frequency (daily, weekly), before-and-after (“from paper registers to a shared Google Sheet”), or recognition (“chosen to train 6 new hires”). Estimates are fine if you can defend them in an interview; invented numbers are not.

Stuck on wording? Paste a plain duty into the free resume bullet point generator and it rewrites it three ways, leaving [brackets] where your numbers go. For finished bullets by profession, browse our resume examples.

List your highest qualification first: degree, institution, city and graduation year. Add your grade if it helps you: a GPA of 3.5/4.0 or above, a First or 2:1 in the UK, or a CGPA of 7.5/10 in India. Leave it off if it doesn't, unless the employer asks.

Where education goes depends on experience. Students and new graduates put it near the top, right after the summary, because it is their strongest evidence. Everyone with two or more years of work puts it after experience. Drop high school once you have a degree (Indian freshers often keep Class 12 and Class 10 marks until their first job).

Certifications go in their own short section if they are relevant to the job: AWS, PMP, CPA, Google Analytics, CompTIA Security+. Projects belong on the resume when they show skills your jobs don't, which is almost always true for new graduates and career changers. Give each project a title, the tools you used and one line on the result.

Your skills section is a quick list of the hard skills the job asks for, in the words the job post uses. If the posting says “Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP)”, write that, not “spreadsheets”. Group skills when the list is long: Languages, Tools, Methods.

Skip soft skills you can't prove in a list (“team player”, “hardworking”). Show them in your bullets instead: “Led a 5-person team” proves leadership better than the word does. Our guide to skills to put on a resume has lists by job and explains how many to include.

Sending the same resume to fifty jobs feels efficient and usually isn't. You don't need to rewrite it each time; you need a ten-minute pass:

1. Read the job post and mark the five most important requirements.
2. Make sure each one appears on your resume, in the post's words, if you genuinely have it.
3. Reorder bullets so the most relevant one is first under each job.
4. Adjust the summary's first line to match the job title in the post.
5. Run the resume and the job description through an ATS checker to see which keywords are still missing.

If the role uses an ATS (most large companies do), our ATS resume tips explain what the software actually does with your file and which layouts it trips over.

Use one readable font (Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Garamond or similar) at 10–12 points for body text, margins of about 1.5–2 cm, and the same date format everywhere (Jan 2023 – Mar 2025). Bold job titles, not random phrases.

Send a PDF unless the employer asks for Word. Name the file so a recruiter can find it again: Priya-Nair-Resume.pdf, not resume_final_v3.pdf.

• Your phone number and email are correct (call yourself; it happens).
• Every job has a title, company, location and month-year dates, with no unexplained gaps. If you have one, read how to explain a career gap.
• Most bullets start with a verb and many contain a number or a clear result.
• The top third of page one would convince someone who reads nothing else.
• No spelling mistakes. Read it aloud, or backwards one line at a time.
• The file is a PDF with your name in the file name.

Then send it with a short, specific cover letter where one is accepted. Our guide on how to write a cover letter takes about as long to read as the letter takes to write.