How to Write a Resume: Everything You Need to Know

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• Contact Information

  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.

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• Professional Summary

  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:

• Hardworking recent college graduate seeks an entry-level marketing position. Recently graduated at the top of class with a degree in marketing and a minor in creative writing — eager to put knowledge to use in a busy marketing department. Past experience includes a proven track record of being a team player who can pivot between assignments with ease.

Unlike a resume objective statement, which typically expresses the job seeker’s wants, a professional summary should focus on what you as a candidate will offer the employer. Identify the problem the company is trying to solve with this hire and then explain how you will solve that problem.

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• Work Experience

  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.

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• Tips section: How to write effective achievements

  Example

  Identify a problem that existed and the action you took to solve it for each entry.

  • Use engaging action words, such as "streamlined", "mobilized" or "dispatched" rather than less-engaging phrases like, "responsible for" or "handled."
  • Pull keywords out of the job ad and do your best to mention achievements that touch on those.
  • Include data to quantify your experience, such as sales revenue, increased donations and information about website traffic.

Following these tips will help paint a picture of the impact your work had on your last organization.

Here’s an example of a good entry in a work experience section:

Marketing Associate, 2016 – Present

ABC Company, Albany, NY

• Assisted the marketing team with building a global brand strategy for our top-performing product.
• Analyzed market trends and recommend solutions, which resulted in a 10 percent upswing in sales annually.
• Organized travel and lodging for a team of 10+ marketing specialists to attend trade shows.

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• Skills

  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.

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• Hard Skills

  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.

• A degree or a certificate in a certain field or specialty
• Computer programming abilities
• Machine operation proficiency
• The number of words that you can type per minute
• Forein language proficiency, eg. speaking French fluently

Just be considerate about what skills you feature. Will the skills you include make someone want to hire you for this role? Your hiring manager might be personally impressedthat you can speak fluent French, but if the job you’re applying to will never make use of this skill, it’s best to leave it out.

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• Soft Skills

  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.

• Motivation
• Communication
• Multitasking
• Organizational ability
• Grace under pressure
• Punctuality

It’s important to let your potential employer know that you have these skills. Of course, since they can’t be quantified they should not have too much focus on your resume. This material might be better suited to include in your cover letter, or given as an anecdote about your ability to multitask in an interview setting.

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• Technical 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.

• Data analytics
• Data modeling
• Technical writing
• Digital marketing
• Experience using various trade-specific computer programs

These skills can be imperative to helping you land a job, especially in an IT-related field. However, it’s important to tailor the technological skills you are plugging to the specific job that you are pursuing. What skills do you offer that would be the most useful to your potential employer? What computer programs do you have experience with that they most likely use?

Now that you have an understanding of the different kinds of skills you should feature in your resume, it’ll be useful to look at the best way to present them.

Here are skills examples you could use for a customer service resume:

• MS Excel — Advanced (Macros, Pivot Tables)
• Bilingual in French and English
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Team player with excellent conflict-resolution skills

How you approach writing your skills depends on the resume format you select. The layout of your skills section changes depending on which of the three main resume formats that you chose. For example, the functional resume is a skills-based format that highlights your hard, soft and technical expertise over your conventional work history and can have multiple resume sections dedicated to your practical skills.

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• Education

  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.

When listing your education, be sure to include the following items on your resume:

• University name, city, country or state.
• Full dates you were in school. For example, January 2016-Present, 2013-2017, or list your anticipated date of graduation.
• Degree title (B.A., MFA, etc.)
• Your major and minor, if applicable to the job you are seeking.
• Only include your GPA if it is 3.5 or higher and you are still a student or recent graduate.

Example

Harvard University

Cambridge, MA

MA in English Literature, minor in French, 2019

3.7 GPA

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• Optional Sections

  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.