How to Write a Resume

Job hunting is tough in 2024. Your resume needs to be on point to give yourself the best odds of success.

Whether you’re a recent graduate or an experienced professional, we explain exactly how to write a resume today to ensure your application is competitive in the current job market.

1. Pick the resume format that’s best for you

There are many ways to format your resume. Your resume should feature your most relevant experiences and skills, so find a way to place your strengths near the top.

The most common approach is to format your resume chronologically (with your most recent experience at the top). This structure demonstrates your career progression. If you’ve grown from an entry-level position to a senior or management-level role in the same type of work, this is the best resume format for you.

If you’ve worked many different types of jobs or have career gaps, try an alternative resume format. For example, you could use the:

• Combination resume – if you have an advanced technical skill set and work history
• Functional resume – if you have gaps in your work history and want to emphasize your skills
• Federal resume – if you’re applying to work with the federal government
• Video resume – if you’re looking for jobs that require video or performance skills

Free resume template (chronological format)

One of the most convenient ways to make a resume is to download a free resume template.

To get started, download the template below and fill in each section as you follow our simple writing steps.

Download This Free Template

2. Enter your contact information

A resume header should quickly highlight your contact information and job title.

Basic contact information for a resume includes your:

1. Name
2. Email address (use a professional one like firstname.lastname@gmail.com)
3. Phone number

You can also add this optional information:

1. Online portfolio or website (if relevant to the job)
2. LinkedIn URL
3. Mailing address (to show you’re local)

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. Summarize your experience and skills with a resume summary

Quickly communicate why you’re the right person for the job with a short but concise resume summary.

A professional resume summary provides a snapshot of your primary qualifications by emphasizing your most impressive achievements and skills in 2-3 sentences.

Here’s exactly how to structure a resume summary:

Try our free resume summary generator

You can generate a professional resume summary in less than a minute with our free tool — give it a try!

4. Write about your professional and job-relevant experience

Your resume’s work experience section is what employers look at to immediately see if you’re qualified. Here’s how to give them the best impression:

By focusing on achievements and career progression

List your current or most recent job at the top of this section, and older jobs below (from newest to oldest).

Here’s how to fill out each work experience position on your resume:

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. Even if you’ve only worked at one company, these title changes prove that you weren’t stagnant in your role.

You should start bullet points with action verbs

Using passive phrases like “responsible for” is a mistake. This phrasing doesn’t do a good job of explaining what you accomplished at work. And it’s just boring.

To make your resume’s experience section best highlight your professional accomplishments, start each bullet point with an action verb. Show what you did, not what you were supposed to do.

You can 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 as a professional.

Only mention experience related to the job you want

Adding every job you’ve ever held to your resume will make it unfocused and cluttered.

A resume isn’t the full history of your life and work experience. Instead, it’s the highlight reel of your career.

To keep your resume on point, 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.

What if I don’t have work 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 anything from independent projects to classwork.

You can list volunteer work and internships

Volunteer work and internships provide opportunities to learn valuable skills directly transferable to a full-time job. Both types of work can show employers you’re qualified for a role (even if you’ve never worked a full day in your life).

List volunteer work on your resume in your relevant experience section with full bullet points, just like you would describe any other job. Do the same thing if you’re putting an internship on your resume.

You can describe relevant schoolwork

If you’re a student and you don’t have any internships yet, you can list relevant coursework on your resume to give employers an idea of what you’re capable of.

To fill out your experience section, you can list relevant classes you’ve taken, or provide a full list of bullet points highlighting a school project you worked on.

5. Showcase your professional skills throughout your resume

There are two types of skills employers look for on resumes — 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.

How you include skills on a resume depends on whether they’re hard or soft skills.

Where to include hard skills on your resume

Employers highly value hard skills because they’re often needed to do the job. A software developer can’t code if they don’t know any coding languages, for instance.

Here are the three places you can highlight hard skills on your resume:

1. Skills section (listing them out directly)
2. Resume summary (showcasing one or two of your strongest professional hard skills)
3. Experience section (describing how you used your hard skills at work)

Combining these approaches helps you best prove to employers you have the hard skills needed to fill the role.

How to showcase your soft skills

Soft skills are what make people pleasant (or unpleasant) to work with. So they’re definitely important to employers. But they’re difficult to quantify, which makes them tricky to prove on your resume.

To make employers buy into your soft skills, you need to show examples of you flexing those soft skills in the workplace.

Here’s an example of a work experience bullet point that effectively highlights the candidate’s leadership skills:

• Led a cross-functional team of 10 members to successfully implement a new project management system, resulting in a 20% increase in team productivity

6. Outline your education history

How much detail you include in your resume’s education section depends on how experienced you are in your industry:

If you have work experience, place your education section near the bottom of your resume.

But for recent graduates and inexperienced jobseekers, the education section can be moved to the top. This provides space to describe awards and academic achievements, and to outline coursework and projects.

Here’s how to format an education section if you have work experience:

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 additional relevant information

Depending on your experience and background, you should add some additional, more specific, resume sections.

One of the most common additions people make to their resume is a certifications section:

List your certifications

If you’re applying for jobs that require specific certifications to get hired, you should include a section on your resume that clearly highlights those certifications.

For example, 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 optional sections you can add to your resume.

For example, some additional qualifications you could add a section to your resume for include:

• Hobbies and interests
• Extracurriculars
• 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.

To help make the proofreading process easier, here’s a checklist you can tick as you complete it:

Feel free to use our on-page checklist, or make a copy in Google Docs and begin reviewing your resume.

Save your resume as a PDF (or Docx)

If the job description doesn’t specify, save your resume as a PDF. PDFs save your formatting even if you use fonts that aren’t installed on the hiring manager’s computer, so they’ll appear exactly as you want them to appear.

How to make a quick and easy resume

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.

Build My Resume

Our free-to-use resume builder can make you a resume in as little as 5 minutes. Just pick the template you want, and our software will format everything for you.

There are plenty of good resume builders online to try out in 2024. Our own AI resume builder helps simplify the process of creating a resume by guiding you through each step and formatting all your information for you.

Our software also provides helpful suggestions and fills out parts of your resume like your summary and work experience. At the end of the process, it formats all your information properly, so you end up with a sleek new resume that’s sure to impress hiring managers.

Tips for elevating your application

Now that you know how to write a great resume, here are some tips for making the process as painless as possible:

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.

Keep a master resume you can use in the future

Writing tailored resumes for each job can get complicated fast. The best way to stay organized and make your life easier is to start a master resume.

A master resume is one long version of your resume where you add all of your experience for each job, as well as all of the results you achieved, all the projects you worked on, and all the skills you’ve developed.

In other words, your master resume should contain not just 5 bullet points for each job, but as many as you can think of. If you’re worried that it’ll look cluttered, that’s okay – your master resume isn’t for anyone’s eyes but your own.

The purpose of a master resume is just to have everything pre-written so that when you need to tailor your resume to a specific job you can easily swap out relevant bullet points.

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, the 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.

So 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.

Choose a matching cover letter template to give your job application a polished, cohesive look:

Download This Free Template

7 resume examples and templates

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 different levels of experience to see what a strong, general resume looks like.

Entry-level resume

This college student does a great job showing off the qualities that make them a valuable candidate on their entry-level resume:

Download This Free Template

Experienced resume

This experienced project manager successfully highlights their skills and expertise on their resume:

Download This Free Template

Modern resume

Download This Free Template

Ideal for jobs in marketing or tech, this modern resume template communicates to employers that you’re forward-thinking and innovative.

Formal resume

Download This Free Template

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

Download This Free Template

With its bright colors and background illustrations, this creative resume template is a good choice for careers in social media management or design.

Professional resume

Download This Free Template

This professional resume template projects confidence, making it a great choice for executives and marketing professionals.

Minimalist resume

Download This Free Template

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.

Additional resume template file types

There are countless resume templates available for a variety of platforms. For example:

• Pages resume templates
• Google Docs resume templates
• Resume templates for Microsoft Word
• LibreOffice and OpenOffice resume templates

More resume writing resources

In addition to our resume-making guide, we also have many other resources to help you build a competitive resume (no matter your industry or level of experience):

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

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:

1. Use word processing software – if you have access to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you can easily build a resume for free.
2. 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:

• Can I send a resume instead of a CV?
• 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?