How to Write a Resume:
Everything You Need to Know

There’s no point in creating a great resume if a recruiter isn’t able to contact you for an interview. It’s vital that you include your complete contact information in the header at the top of your resume.

Consider highlighting your header with a slight change of font size or a rule line to make it stand out. Keep the font simple and legible — Helvetica, Times New Roman, Calibri or Arial are designed for readability and are excellent font choices for a resume. Read on to learn what exactly to include in your contact information section.

This section is a short explanation of your qualifications and experience, and lets employers know right away what you will bring to the table. A professional summary should touch on your hard and soft skills, be concise and address a problem you can help the company solve.

The idea is to pack it with relevant facts about you and your background, but be intriguing enough to pique an employers’ curiosity about you.

Look closely at the job description and gather the keywords used throughout. Also ask yourself, "What is the company hoping to accomplish with this hire?"

Here’s a summary example that might work well for a recent grad:

The length of this section will depend on how long you’ve been in the workforce.

Use action verbs to describe your duties. Recruiters and hiring managers read several resumes in any given day — use dynamic words in your experience section to stand out. For example, if one of your responsibilities was to order office supplies, it’s more interesting to read that you "executed and maintained a new system for ordering supplies" than it is to read that you were "responsible for placing orders."

Remember, your entire resume should be written in the third person — no first-person pronouns. Use four to six bullet points to break up copy.

This section should not only recount your past duties and responsibilities, but shed light on your accomplishments and achievements. Use data to quantify these achievements. For example, if your new system for ordering supplies saved the company money by reducing duplicate orders, explain it. "Consolidated the weekly orders into monthly orders thereby reducing duplicate ordering and cutting spending by 7 percent."

For recent graduates or those with a limited job history, this section can be tricky. In these cases, list any relevant summer jobs, part-time work or internships that you’ve held. It’s still important to list any past work experience and call out the qualifications and qualities that made you good at your job even if your past roles don’t relate to the current job you are seeking.

This section might be the most important area of your resume on which to focus. List your hard, soft and technical skills, paying special attention to repeated phrases and keywords in the job description.

As you scan the job ad, echo exactly the language it uses for skills. If it calls for a candidate with "strong customer service skills", you should duplicate this language in your skills section. Rephrasing the wording, even slightly, can make it difficult to get your resume past applicant tracking systems (ATS).

Personalize this section for each job you apply to. It only takes a few minutes and might be the difference between getting your resume into the hands of a hiring manager or not.

It will help to familiarize yourself with the three different kinds of skills to feature on your resume. Again, these should be personalized to the job description at hand.

These are objective and measurable qualifications you should present to a recruiter or hiring manager in your resume. Because they’re concrete, they serve as strong verification to your potential employer of your ability and skill set.

These skills are also helpful for you to showcase. However, unlike hard skills, soft skills are a bit more subjective and harder to quantify. Most interpersonal skills fall under the umbrella of soft skills.

These fall under the umbrella of hard skills. Moreso, they’re hard skills that involve nuanced or niche-specific technology and computer-based ability. Technical skills often require more education, training or hands-on experience. So, they are very advantageous to showcase on your resume, especially when applying to a job in the realm of computers and technology.

Employers are interested in your education, especially if you’re a recent graduate. While it’s always important to list your degree(s), new grads with limited work experience may choose to make their education more prominent.

It’s OK to list your GPA if you just graduated, but if you’ve been in the workforce for a while, don’t list it. GPAs are only relevant for a year or two out of college.

While the sections above are "must include" information, there might be additional accomplishments or activities that you’d like an employer to know about.

Recent graduates who are learning how to write a resume might want to include interesting pastimes in a "Hobbies" section. Or, for those who might have had their thesis or research papers published, a "Publications and Conferences" section could be ideal to add.