How to Write a Resume: A Step-by-Step Guide

A resume has one job: to get you an interview. It doesn't need to tell your whole story. It needs to convince a busy recruiter, often in under a minute, that you can do the job in front of them. Everything below follows from that.

The short version: put your contact details and a three-line summary at the top, list your experience newest first with bullet points that show results, add the skills the job ad asks for, keep it to one or two pages, and send it as a PDF unless the employer asks for Word.

1. Know what goes on a resume

Almost every resume uses the same sections, in roughly this order:

1. Contact details: name, phone, a professional email, city and country (no full street address), and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if you have one.
2. Summary: three or four lines on who you are professionally and what you bring.
3. Work experience: your roles, newest first, with achievements under each.
4. Skills: the hard skills and tools relevant to the job.
5. Education: degrees, schools and years; add grades only if you are a recent graduate and they help you.
6. Optional sections: certifications, projects, languages, volunteering, awards or publications, when they strengthen your case.

Recent graduates can move education above experience. Career changers sometimes lead with a skills or projects section. More on that in our guide to resume formats.

2. Get the contact section right

It sounds trivial, but small mistakes here cost interviews:

• Use an email address based on your name, not a nickname.
• Give one phone number you actually answer, with the country code if you apply abroad.
• City and country are enough. Recruiters use location to judge commute or relocation, not to visit.
• Leave out date of birth, marital status and national ID numbers unless they are required where you live.
• Put your contact details in the body of the page, not in the document header, which some applicant tracking systems skip.

3. Write a summary that earns the next ten seconds

The summary sits at the top, so it is often the only paragraph read in full. Think of it as the answer to "Why should I keep reading?" A useful pattern is who you are + your strongest proof + what you are looking for:

Registered nurse with 6 years in emergency and critical care at a 400-bed teaching hospital. Trusted with charge-nurse shifts and the training of new graduates; BLS, ACLS and TNCC certified. Looking for a senior ED role where clinical leadership matters.

Avoid empty adjectives ("hard-working, passionate team player") that every applicant uses. Specifics such as years, settings, tools, certifications and results do the persuading for you.

4. Turn duties into achievements in your experience section

For each role, list the job title, employer, location and dates (month and year), then three to six bullet points. The most common mistake is listing duties, the things anyone in the job does, instead of what you achieved. A reliable formula:

Action verb + what you did + the result, with a number where you can.

Tips that make bullets stronger:

• Start with a varied, specific verb: built, cut, launched, negotiated, trained, resolved, redesigned, not "helped with" or "responsible for".
• Quantify: money, time, volume, percentages, team size, customers, rankings. An honest estimate ("about 40 calls a day") is fine.
• Put your most impressive bullet first in each role; recruiters read the top of each list.
• Give more space to recent and relevant roles, and less to old or unrelated ones.

If you're stuck for wording, each of our job-title pages collects bullet points from its examples, quantified ones first. See the software engineer bullet points or browse examples for your job, then rewrite them with your real numbers.

5. List skills that match the job

Your skills section is where most keyword matching happens, both by applicant tracking systems and by recruiters skimming for must-haves. Read the job ad and include the skills it names that you genuinely have, using the same wording ("Microsoft Excel", not just "spreadsheets", if that is what the ad says).

• Favour hard skills and tools: software, methods, languages, licences, equipment.
• Prove soft skills in your bullet points instead of listing them ("led a team of 8" beats "leadership").
• Ten to fifteen skills is plenty. Group them (for example Languages / Frameworks / Tools) if you have many.

6. Add education, certifications and extras

List your highest qualification first: degree, institution and year. Leave out school-level education once you have a degree. Certifications that employers in your field screen for (PMP, CPA, CCNA, a nursing licence) deserve their own section near the top of the page, not the bottom.

Projects, volunteering and languages earn their place when they show skills the job needs, particularly for students, career changers and anyone returning after a break.

7. Keep the layout clean and the length right

• Length: one page for most people with under ten years of experience; two pages beyond that. A third page is rarely read outside academia.
• Font: a readable font at 10–12 pt for body text, with headings a little larger. Use one or two fonts, not five.
• Margins and spacing: 1.5–2.5 cm (0.6–1 inch) margins, and white space between sections so the page can be skimmed.
• Layout: a single-column layout is the safest for applicant tracking systems. Save sidebars and graphics for applications a person will read directly. Our ATS guide explains why.

8. Tailor it for every application

Keep a master resume with everything, then make a copy for each job and spend ten minutes adjusting it:

1. Rewrite the summary's last line to match the role.
2. Reorder bullet points so the most relevant achievements come first.
3. Add the job ad's key skills that you have and remove irrelevant ones.
4. Mirror the ad's job title and terminology where it truthfully describes your work.

The resume buildercan duplicate a resume per application and check it against a pasted job ad, showing which of the ad's skills you already cover and which are missing. It runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.

9. Proofread, then send it as a PDF

• Read it aloud, then read it backwards sentence by sentence; both catch errors your eye skips.
• Check that dates, job titles and employer names are consistent and correct.
• Ask someone else to read it. A fresh pair of eyes finds what you can't.
• Save as PDF so your layout survives every device, unless the employer asks for Word. Name the file sensibly: Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf.

Final checklist

• Contact details are correct and in the page body.
• The summary is specific to you and the job.
• Every role has achievement-focused bullets, ideally with numbers.
• Skills match the job ad's wording.
• One or two pages, a clean single-column layout, consistent dates.
• No typos; saved as a PDF with a clear file name.

Frequently asked questions