Research shows that 57% of hiring managers only look at your resume for a few minutes at most. If you want to land a job, you need to get their attention – and fast.
We’ll walk you through what you need to prepare to make a resume that gets you hired. Additionally, we’ll provide some tips and resources to make sure you walk away from this article with the perfect resume ready to send to employers.
1. Collect all your professional information
Want to write the best resume possible? You need to prepare ahead of time.
Gather any and all information related to your professional background and list everything in a master resume. This process might sound tedious, but it’ll make the actual resume writing process smoother because you’ll have all the details you need ready to go.
Information to gather before writing your resume
- Past and present jobs – including start and end dates, name of employer, location, job title, and a list of basic responsibilities.
- Notable achievements – these could be from your academic career or professional life. Make sure to quantify your achievements on your resume using hard numbers or data where possible.
- Hard and soft skills – think of any skill that might help you excel in the workplace, from data analytics to public speaking.
- Education history – jot down your graduation date, school name, location, honors, and any notable coursework.
- Volunteer work or extracurriculars – this could include formal or informal positions. List the name of the organization, when you were involved, and your basic duties.
- Certifications – list the awarding body, when you were certified, and the official certification title.
- Awards & honors – if you’ve ever received an award, list the awarding body, title of the award, when you received it, and provide a brief explanation for why you were awarded.
Once you’ve got all your professional information listed in one place, it’s time to start creating your resume.
We’ll show you how to create a chronological resume, but there are also other ways to format your resume if you don’t want to emphasize your work history.
2. List your contact information at the top
Start by listing your name and contact information in your resume’s header.
Use a larger font (20pt or larger) for your first and last name to make it stand out to the reader.
Contact information to include in your header
- First and last name
- Email address (use a professional one like firstname.lastname@gmail.com)
- Phone number
Optional (but helpful) information
- Online portfolio or website (if relevant to the job)
- LinkedIn URL
- City and State to show you’re in the area
Some online resume examples include professional headshots in the header. If you’re applying to jobs in the US, don’t include your photo because it could lead to hiring bias (unless you work a job that requires a resume picture).
3. Write a convincing resume summary
Writing a summary of your experience and skills at the top of your resume is an effective way to grab the attention of employers.
A professional resume summary provides a snapshot of your primary qualifications by emphasizing your most impressive achievements and skills in 2-3 sentences. If you want to quickly make your own or generate an example of what one looks like, use our free generator tool below:
Generate a professional resume summary instantly, or use our AI-powered summary generator to customize your own in 2 minutes.
What word best describes the type of job seeker you are?*
- Senior
- Executive
- Mid-level
- Veteran
- Intermediate
- Entry-level
- Licensed
- Qualified
- Aspiring
- Certified
- Registered
What work environment are you looking to work in?
- Company
- Store
- Organization
- Establishment
- Firm
- Hospital
- School
- Precinct
- Restaurant
- Bank
- Pharmacy
- Dispensary
- Bar
- Gym
- Center
- Facility
- Hotel
- Clinic
What position are you applying for?*
How many years of experience do you have?*
What are your main responsibilities at work?*
6. What word best describes you in your professional life?
- Adaptable
- Diligent
- Detail-oriented
- Efficient
- Focused
- Hard-working
- Goal-oriented
- Results-oriented
- Proactive
- Quality-oriented
- Motivated
- Reliable
- Talented
- Creative
- Experienced
- Loyal
- Innovative
- Curious
- Versatile
- Diverse
- Extroverted
- Modest
7. Which soft skills would your peers and/or clients praise you for?
What are your top professional skills?*
Do you have any relevant licenses or certifications?
- Experience Level: Loading...
- Target Work Environment: Loading...
- Target Position: Loading...
- Years of Experience: Loading...
- Current Responsibilities: Loading...
- Professional Identity: Loading...
- Top Soft Skills: Loading...
- Top Professional Skills: Loading...
- License/Certification: Loading...
4. List your work experience (the right way)
Your resume’s work experience section is what employers look at to immediately see if you’re qualified. Take your time making this section clear and full of achievements to give your application the best shot at landing you interviews.
To start, list your current or most recent job at the top of this section, and older jobs below (from newest to oldest).
How to structure work experience on your resume
Job title – Dates employed (year and month)
Company name – Company location (city and state)
- Three to five bullet points describing your achievements and responsibilities
- Include hard numbers in your bullet points when possible
- Start each bullet point with an action verb
Use present tense when describing current responsibilities, and past tense when discussing previous roles or completed projects.
If you’ve been promoted, list these roles separately to showcase your career growth and increase in responsibility. Most employers are looking for this growth, so you don’t want to hide it from them.
Start your experience bullet points with action verbs
Highlight your professional accomplishments by starting each bullet point with an action verb in your experience section. Show what you did on the job, not what you were supposed to do.
Avoid using passive phrases like “responsible for”. This phrasing doesn’t do a good job of explaining what you accomplished at work.
20 action verbs for your resume
| Administer | Analyze | Convey | Coordinate |
| Correspond | Design | Develop | Enhance |
| Execute | Facilitate | Generate | Implement |
| Initiate | Innovate | Lead | Negotiate |
| Optimize | Oversee | Streamline | Supervise |
Highlight your work accomplishments with hard numbers
Demonstrate your impact as an employee by including numbers in your bullet points.
Numbers add context to your on-the-job achievements, and show hiring managers what you’re capable of at work.
No numbers or action verbs (boring)
- Responsible for making media kits for company projects
Both numbers and action verbs (clear)
- Spearheaded the development of the first media kit for all company projects, increasing journalist pitches by 43% in the first year
Demonstrate your most valuable skills
Your skills section isn’t the only place you want to highlight your talents. You should also provide real-life examples of how you put your skills to the test in your work experience section.
For example, if you have specific soft skills (like communication or time management) you want employers to know about, don’t just list them out. Instead, add a bullet point to your resume demonstrating how you flexed those skills in the workplace.
Here’s an example of a work experience bullet point that effectively highlights the candidate’s leadership skills:
How to highlight soft skills through your work experience
- Led a cross-functional team of 10 members to successfully implement a new project management system, resulting in a 20% increase in team productivity
This way, you’re not just telling employers you have leadership skills – you’re showing them.
Only mention experience related to the job you want
A resume isn’t the full history of your life and work experience. Instead, it’s a highlight reel of your career.
To keep your resume on topic, remove positions and skills that aren’t relevant to the job you want. As a general rule, 2-4 job titles in your experience section are enough to showcase your fit for the role.
If you don’t have related experience
Writing a resume with no work experience is still possible (we all have to start somewhere)! Filling out your experience section will just require a bit of creativity.
First, rename your work experience section “Relevant Experience”. Then, list any relevant experience you have the same way you would for a full-time job. Relevant experience could be any of the following:
- Independent projects
- Classwork
- Volunteer work
- Extracurricular activities
- Internships
If you’re struggling to fill out your work experience section, consider using a resume bullet point generator to get some inspiration.
5. Highlight your most relevant skills
If you have skills that are directly relevant to the job you want, list them in your resume’s skills section.
There are two types of skills to put on your resume — hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are learned through training, workshops, work experience, and school (like math, Spanish, and CPR).
Soft skills are developed throughout the course of your life. Organizational skills like time management and punctuality are examples of soft skills employers value.
Hard skills
Employers value hard skills because they’re often needed to do the job. For example, a software developer can’t code if they don’t know any coding languages.
If you have hard skills that a hiring manager is looking for, simply list them in your skills section to show them that you’re qualified for the job. Here’s an example:
If you’re not sure what skills to list on your resume, you probably already have some general hard skills you developed through school or work. For example:
- Computer skills (AI prompt writing, Google suite)
- Foreign language skills
- Writing & editing (proofreading, copyediting)
- Data analysis (Excel, SQL)
However, hard skills are provable, so make sure you’re being honest when you list a hard skill on your resume. If you lie on your resume about having a skill, you might get embarrassed during an interview, or even potentially fired after getting initially hired.
Don’t have any relevant hard skills? It’s okay to leave the skills section off your resume, and instead focus more on your work experience and education.
Soft skills
Like we explained earlier, the best way to demonstrate your soft skills is by providing examples of these skills in your work experience section.
Soft skills are simply difficult to prove. If you list “leadership skills” on your resume without any context, hiring managers don’t have any metric by which to evaluate you. Have you led a team before? How big was the team? What did you achieve as a leader?
To get ahead of these questions, avoid listing soft skills in your skills section entirely. Instead, focus on them through your work experience section.
6. List your highest degree and other education details
How much detail you include in your resume’s education section depends on the amount of work experience you have.
- If you haven’t attended college – list your high school or GED, and your graduation date.
- If you’re a college student or recent graduate – list your school, degree, graduation date, GPA (if above 3.5), and any honors you were awarded.
- If you have 2+ years of work experience – just list your school, degree, and graduation date.
- If you have 10+ years of work experience – list your school and degree.
If you have any relevant work experience, place your education section near the bottom of your resume.
But if you’re a recent graduate, have minimal work experience, or your degree is highly related to your job, move your education section towards the top of your resume. This provides space to describe awards and academic achievements, and to outline coursework and projects.
How to format your education section
Your degree name
The name of the college or high school (and its location) – Your graduation date (if it’s within the last 15 years)
- Your GPA (if higher than 3.5)
- Latin honors
Ultimately, your resume’s education section can be as detailed as you want. Just make sure the information you include is relevant to the job.
7. Add certifications and other relevant sections
Depending on your experience and background, you might want to add some additional sections to your resume highlighting other, more specific qualifications.
For example, the most common addition people make to their resume is a certifications section.
If you’re applying for jobs that require specific certifications to get hired, include a section on your resume that clearly highlights those certifications.
If you work in education, medicine, or construction, you likely have more than one professional certification. In these fields, you should add a certifications section to your resume to clearly show employers that you’re qualified.
Other optional sections to put on your resume
Aside from certifications, there are many other sections you can add to your resume if they make sense for the job you’re targeting, including:
- Hobbies and interests
- Extracurricular activities
- Awards
- Publications
- Language skills
- Personal projects
8. Proofread your resume and finish your application
Spend some time reading through your resume at least a couple of times before you send it off. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make a typo and how hard it is to spot them in your own writing.
You should also give your resume to a friend or relative to read through so they can help you notice any mistakes on your resume.
Also consider using an AI resume checker to scan your resume for issues outside of grammar and spelling mistakes.
To help make the proofreading process easier, here’s a checklist you can tick as you complete it:
Contact information is accurate and complete – employers will know how to reach you
Email address is professional – for example, firstname.lastname@email.com
Leaves out headshots or sensitive personal information
Fits on one page (or two pages if you’re experienced)
Information is easy to read – fonts are above 10pt+ and sections don’t look too crowded
Design is appropriate for the position you’re applying for
Includes all the relevant sections highlighting how you’re qualified (certifications, licenses, technical skills, etc.)
Quantifies achievements with numbers in the work experience section
Uses action verbs to describe your experience
Addresses the requirements listed in the job ad
No typos or grammatical errors
Clearly formatted and professional – content is well-organized, aligned properly, and makes good use of white space
Save your resume as a PDF (or Docx)
If the job description doesn’t specify, save your resume as a PDF because they save your formatting even if you use fonts that aren’t installed on the hiring manager’s computer.
Your resume’s file name should be simple and clear to make it easy for the hiring manager to find later. For example, Gloria-Chen-Resume.pdf is a good file name because it contains the applicant’s name and the word “resume.”
Make a resume quickly with online software
If you’re short on time or simply don’t like writing, use a resume builder to put together a resume that earns you interviews.
Our free-to-use resume builder can make you a resume in as little as 5 minutes. Pick the template you want, and our software will format everything for you.
There are plenty of good resume builders online to help job seekers quickly spin out usable resumes. However, usable alone isn’t good enough in today’s competitive job market.
Our own AI resume builder is both fast and effective at generating competitive resumes for users in any industry — assisting with content generation and even automatic formatting.
Our software also provides helpful suggestions within the builder to give you the best chance of creating a downloadable resume that earns you an interview.
If you plan to use our software to make a cover letter as well, we recommend using the same template to create a visually consistent application.
Other ways to make your resume and job application stand out
Here are some tips for making your resume stand out to hiring managers and recruiters:
Choose an appropriate design for your resume
The way you design your resume has a huge impact on how employers perceive you, and can make or break or chances of landing a job.
Your resume design includes all the visual details like:
- the colors used on your resume
- which resume font you pick
- whether or not you use a sidebar
- how you set up your headers
For formal industries like law or finance, stick to a simple, traditional resume style. Simple resume templates with clean lines, no graphics, and dark colors like navy blue or burgundy are most appropriate.
For creative industries like tech or marketing, you should use a more modern design for your resume. Modern resume templates include brighter colors, sans-serif fonts, and graphic details like illustrated skill levels or sidebars.
Use ChatGPT to improve your resume
ChatGPT is a great tool for improving your resume and is becoming more popular with job seekers in all industries. We’ve designed 8 specialized prompts to help you take your resume to the next level.
Before you rush to make a resume with ChatGPT, it’s important to remember that AI tools aren’t a magic wand. To get the best results from ChatGPT, you need to think carefully about how you structure your prompt, what information you provide, and the limitations of AI software.
Make a matching cover letter
Many jobs request or require that you send in a cover letter along with your resume.
Before you start sending out job applications, make sure you know how to write a compelling cover letter that highlights your strengths as a candidate.
And to give your job application a polished, cohesive look, try out a matching cover letter template:
If you’re not sure how to start your cover letter, look at cover letter examples for your industry.
Expert-approved resume examples
The best way to check that your resume meets the standards for your industry is to look at examples written by other people in your field.
Here are two resume examples for you to check out to get an idea of what clear, well-written resumes look like for candidates of different experience levels.
Entry-level resume (no work experience)
This college student does a great job showing off the qualities that make them a valuable candidate on their entry-level resume:
Mid-level resume (some work experience)
This experienced project manager successfully highlights their skills and expertise on their resume:
Senior-level resume (decades of work experience)
This multipage executive resume effectively highlights the candidate’s decades of leadership experience. We recommend downloading the resume if you want to see the rest of this executive’s resume:
Templates to make your own job-winning resume
It’s not always enough that your resume’s content demonstrates your qualifications—your resume’s design also needs to be professional and clear. These five free resume templates are a great starting point for making a professional-looking resume.
Modern resume
Ideal for jobs in marketing or tech, this modern resume template communicates to employers that you’re forward-thinking and innovative.
Formal resume
Applying for work in a highly formal industry? This basic resume template is as buttoned-up as it gets. If you’re looking for work in law or finance, this is the perfect template for you.
Creative resume
With its bright colors and background illustrations, this creative resume template is a good choice for careers in social media management or design.
While this template includes space for a photo on your resume, we recommend not to do this unless you’re applying for work in a field where your appearance is relevant (like acting or modeling).
Professional resume
This professional resume template projects confidence, making it a great choice for executives and marketing professionals.
Minimalist resume
Simple and clean, this minimalist resume template is a safe choice for just about any job because it’s highly formal but still modern-looking.
Resume templates for different file types
There are countless resume templates available for a variety of platforms. For example:
- Resume templates for Microsoft Word
- Google Docs resume templates
- Pages resume templates
- LibreOffice and OpenOffice resume templates
Resume writing FAQs
Still have some unanswered questions? Here are some answers to common questions about writing a resume:
Should I worry about applicant tracking systems?
If you’ve done any research about writing your resume online, you’ve probably seen warnings about how it’s essential to make your resume Applicant Tracking System (ATS) friendly – or else you’ll never land a job!
The fact is, the risk of being rejected from a job by ATS software is overstated. Most hiring managers and recruiters still manually review your resume even if they also use an ATS.
However, it’s true that many larger companies and recruitment firms use ATS software extensively. So depending on where you want to work, you should still follow best practices to make sure your resume is successfully parsed by ATS software to save hiring managers a headache when trying to read your resume. Do this by:
- Using a Microsoft Word document
- Leaving out tables and additional columns
- Avoiding images and graphics
If you’re worried about your resume being successfully scanned by ATS software, you can use a free resume checker to make sure you won’t run into any problems.
What makes a good resume?
Here’s what makes a good resume:
- A clear, professional layout and design
- Easy-to-identify contact information
- Tailoring each section to the job you’re applying for
- A resume introduction that sums up your key qualifications
- A work experience section that uses action verbs and quantifies your accomplishments
- An education section that highlights your academic achievements
- A skills section that showcases a targeted combination of hard and soft skills
Should I include references on my resume?
No, you shouldn’t include references on your resume. While people used to do this, it’s no longer considered necessary because employers will reach out to you later in the hiring process if they want to hear from your references.
Including a reference section on your resume just uses up valuable space that would be better put to use elaborating on your achievements and skills.
How many jobs should you list on a resume?
You should list three to four jobs on a resume. As a general rule, you should highlight the last 10-15 years of work experience on your resume, depending on your career level and the job you’re applying for.
If you have a lot of relevant experience that goes back further than this, you can include some additional positions, but it’s not necessary to list every job you’ve ever held.
How do you make a resume for free?
There are a couple of ways to make a resume for free:
- Use word processing software – if you have access to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you can easily build a resume for free.
- Use a resume template – download a resume template for Google Docs or Word and fill out each section with your information for a professionally designed free resume.
No matter which method you choose, always proofread your resume at the end to make sure it looks professional and there aren’t any mistakes that could hurt your chances of landing a job.
What can I do if I still have questions about making my resume?
If you still have questions about making your resume, here are some additional answers to more specific questions:
- How many jobs should you list on a resume?
- Is it OK to lie on your resume?
- Is it resume or resumé?
- Can I make a resume on my phone?
- Should I put a job I got fired from on my resume?
- Should I put my resume on LinkedIn?
- Can you say “I” on a resume?
- How bad is a gap on my resume?
- What should you name your resume file?
Conrad Benz
Content Manager
Conrad Benz is a Content Manager and Hiring Manager at Resume Genius. With 5+ years of experience as a career services professional, Conrad is passionate about helping people navigate the job search process and find fulfilling work. You can find Conrad’s career insights in publications like Typsy, Resume Library, CompTIA, and more. Conrad graduated with a B.A. in International Relations from Goucher College in Maryland and currently lives in Taipei, Taiwan, where he helps ensure every article on Resume Genius provides job seekers with the information they need to succeed. If you want to reach Conrad for a quote or media-related inquiry, you can contact him at [conrad] @ [resumegenius.com].
View Conrad's Profile
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How to Make a Resume
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