What are three don’ts to resume writing?

Don’t describe your job duties instead of your results — a “responsible for” bullet tells a reader what your title covered, not what you actually produced. Don’t use a layout with tables, columns, or text boxes; those are the elements most likely to scramble how parsing software reads your file. And don’t list a skill you can’t back up in an interview — it tends to surface the moment someone asks a follow-up question.

How do I start writing my resume?

Start with contact info and skip the objective statement unless your situation calls for one, then write a two-to-three-sentence summary stating what you do, at what level, and what you’re known for. Move to work experience next, one bullet at a time: write the plain, honest version of what happened first, then add what resulted from it. Skills and education come last — they carry the least weight for most experienced candidates.

What are 5 common mistakes people make on their resume?

Writing duties instead of outcomes, using a generic summary that could describe a hundred other candidates, formatting with tables or columns that break ATS parsing, listing outdated or irrelevant skills instead of what the target role actually needs, and sending an identical resume to every posting instead of reordering it around what each job specifically asks for. Each one is fixable through editing — none of them require starting over.

Should a resume be one page or two?

One page covers most early-career resumes. Two pages is standard and expected once you have roughly a decade or more of relevant experience to show — padding a thin one-pager helps nobody, and cramming a real 15-year history onto one page usually means cutting evidence that would have helped you. The real test isn’t the page count; it’s whether every line on the page is doing work for the reader.

How to Write a Resume: A Step-by-Step Guide That Skips the Fluff

A resume's first job is not to be read — it is to survive being scanned. A recruiter's first pass over a new resume is a fast keep-or-toss decision, not a careful evaluation, and only the resumes that clear it get a real read. That changes what "writing a resume" actually means. It is not a writing exercise. It is an editing exercise: your job is to make sure the right few lines are the ones sitting where that first, fast pass lands.

Here is the order that actually works, section by section, with the decisions that matter inside each one. None of it is exotic — the sections themselves are the same seven or eight that every resume has had for decades. What changes the outcome is what goes inside them.

1. Contact info: three or four lines, nothing clever

Name, phone, email, city and state (no full street address — that went out with fax machines), and a LinkedIn URL if the profile is current. Skip the objective statement here unless your situation falls into one of the specific cases in our resume objective guide — for nearly everyone else, an objective just repeats what the job title already tells the reader.

If you are in a field where work samples matter more than a networking profile — a developer's GitHub, a designer's portfolio site, a writer's published clips — swap that link in for LinkedIn instead of running both. Two links is one too many; pick whichever one actually helps a reader decide, and cut the other. The same logic applies to the email address itself: firstname.lastname@ reads as current and professional, where a leftover handle from 2009 quietly dates the rest of the page before anyone reaches your first bullet.

The list of what does not belong here is short but worth saying plainly: no headshot photo, no date of birth, no marital status, and — for anyone senior enough to be tempted by it — no line of buzzwords standing in for an actual summary. A hiring manager with fifteen years of your own experience to draw on does not need "visionary leader" asserted at them; the work experience section is where that gets proven instead.

2. Summary: two to three sentences that could only be about you

This is the section people write worst, because they write it generically. "Hardworking professional with strong communication skills seeking to leverage experience" describes zero specific humans. It also describes a hundred other resumes the same recruiter will read that week.

A summary that works answers three things fast: what you do, at what level, and what you are known for. For an experienced candidate, something like:

Operations manager with 6 years running warehouse logistics for mid-size distributors. Cut fulfillment errors 40% by redesigning intake workflows at two separate sites. Known for fixing broken processes, not just flagging them.

Notice there is a number, a specific responsibility, and a trait backed by evidence rather than asserted. The same principle holds even without years of work history behind it. Compare:

Weak: "Recent graduate with a degree in marketing seeking an entry-level position to grow my skills."
Better: "Marketing graduate who ran paid social campaigns for two student-organization clients during a 6-month internship, growing one account's engagement threefold. Comfortable in Meta Ads Manager and Google Analytics from day one."

Same three ingredients — what you do, at what level, what you are known for — just built from an internship instead of a decade of titles. We wrote a full breakdown with more before-and-afters, across more situations, in resume summary examples that do not sound like a template.

3. Work experience: lead every bullet with the result, not the task

This is where most resumes lose. The default instinct is to describe what you were responsible for. Recruiters do not hire responsibility — they hire evidence that you produced outcomes. Compare:

Weak: "Responsible for managing social media accounts and creating content."
Better: "Grew Instagram following from 4,200 to 31,000 in 11 months by shifting posting cadence to short-form video; drove a 22% increase in site traffic from social referral."

The pattern holds in fields that never touch a follower count. From a customer service resume:

Weak: "Responsible for handling customer complaints and processing returns."
Better: "Resolved an average of 45 customer escalations a week at a 92% first-contact resolution rate; cut average handle time by 3 minutes per call after rewriting the team's return-approval script."

The second version is longer in both cases, and that is fine — it earns the extra length. If you genuinely do not have a number, use scale, scope, or comparison instead: "the only person on a 12-person team who could troubleshoot the legacy billing system" is a real signal even without a percentage attached.

A trick that works when you are stuck: write the boring, honest version of the bullet first — what you actually did, plainly. Then ask "so what happened because of that?" and put the answer in front. Most people bury the impact at the end of the sentence, if they include it at all.

List experience in reverse chronological order (most recent first) unless you have a specific reason not to — we cover the exceptions in the resume format guide. Three to five bullets per role is enough for anything beyond your current or most recent job; older roles can shrink to one or two lines.

4. Skills: a short list of things you could be tested on

Skip the skill bars and 1-to-5 ratings — they add nothing a human can act on, and most parsing software cannot read a graphic rating at all. List specific tools, languages, methodologies, or certifications relevant to the role you want, and be honest: this section is the one most likely to come up in an actual interview follow-up question, so "proficient in Python" had better survive someone asking what you built with it.

It is also worth matching a posting's specific wording rather than padding the list with everything you have ever touched. SHRM has reported on how a poorly configured applicant tracking system can filter out qualified candidates over an exact keyword mismatch, which is part of why the words on the page matter as much as the skills behind them — see our breakdown of which resume keywords actually matter for how to pick the right ones without stuffing the section.

Vague entries are the other common failure here, and they are easy to spot once you know to look. Compare:

Weak: "Strong communicator, team player, detail-oriented."
Better: "SQL, Tableau, Salesforce Admin (certified), project scoping for cross-functional teams of 6–10."

Traits like "team player" are not skills — they are personality claims nobody can verify from a list, and they crowd out the specific tools and credentials a reader (human or software) is actually scanning for.

5. Education: shrinks as your career grows

Early career, this section can carry real weight — relevant coursework, GPA if it is strong, honors. Ten years in, it is a single line: degree, school, year (or no year, if you are worried about age bias — that is a legitimate and common choice). Nobody at year ten is deciding based on your college minor.

This is also usually where a resume's overall length gets decided, since education is the section with the most room to compress. Indeed's own guidance puts one to two pages as the range that covers most job seekers, with longer resumes reserved for fields like academia or research. If you are not sure which side of that line you land on, we cover it by career stage in how long your resume should actually be.

If you do not have a four-year degree, this section is not where the resume falls apart — it is just a different set of lines. Relevant certifications, a completed bootcamp, licensing exams, or coursework toward a credential all belong here exactly the way a degree would, listed the same way: name, issuing body, date. If a posting lists a degree as required and it is not something you have, the honest move is to make sure whatever credentials you do hold are clearly on the page — not to leave the section blank and hope the rest of the resume compensates.

6. Formatting: boring on purpose

Standard section headers, one column, no tables, no text boxes, no graphics competing for attention with your actual content. This is not about being unoriginal — it is about the fact that a meaningful share of resumes get parsed by software before a person ever opens the file, and clever layouts are exactly what breaks that parsing.

The failure modes are specific and avoidable. A two-column layout can get read top-to-bottom across the whole line rather than down each column, which jumbles a job title into the wrong date range. Contact information placed in a document header or footer sometimes gets skipped entirely, because that region is not treated as body content. Greenhouse's own support documentation notes that embedded images or unconventional resume layouts can cause a candidate's information to be uploaded incorrectly, and Lever's parser is built to pull employers, dates, and contact details out of standard, single-column text — which only works if that is what your resume actually gives it. We go deep on why in how ATS software actually works.

Check what you just wrote

Run it through our free ATS Check — no account needed — to see exactly what a parser pulls from the file, and fix anything it can’t read before you send it anywhere.

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PDF or Word? Use whichever one is actually being asked for

PDF locks your formatting in place — the fonts, spacing, and layout look identical no matter what device or program opens it, which makes it the safer default when a human is going to be the one reading the file. Word (.docx) is a different tradeoff: underneath the visual layout, it is closer to plain structured text, which is why some parsing systems extract it more reliably, and why a recruiter who wants to leave comments or forward an edited copy internally will often ask for it by name.

The short version: if a posting or application portal tells you which format it wants, use exactly that — it is usually because their specific system handles one better than the other. If nothing is specified, PDF is the reasonable default for a document a human is going to open and read. Either way, the format is a delivery choice, not a formatting fix — a resume built with tables and columns will cause the same parsing problems whether you save it as a PDF or a Word file.

One more small thing that is easy to overlook: name the file itself something a recruiter can find again. "Resume_Final_v3.pdf" tells a reader nothing once it is saved into a folder with forty other applicants' files. "FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf" does the job in five seconds, and it is the same file a recruiter is more likely to reopen when they are deciding who to call back.

7. Tailoring: what actually needs to change per application

Once a resume is written, the highest-leverage thing left to do is not writing more — it is reordering. Put the job posting next to your resume and go bullet by bullet: does this line answer something the posting actually asked for? If a bullet does not connect to anything in the posting, it probably belongs lower in the list, not deleted and not rewritten from scratch.

This works best when you keep one complete, up-to-date version — a Master Resume, in effect — and treat every application-specific copy as a reordering of it, not a rewrite. Maintaining a dozen separate forked resumes is how people end up sending an employer a version with an old phone number or a job that ended two roles ago; one source of truth that you copy and reorder avoids that entirely.

Here is what that looks like on the operations manager example from earlier. The underlying fact never changes — only which half of it leads.

Master version: "Redesigned intake workflows across two warehouse sites, cutting fulfillment errors 40% and training six new leads on the updated process."
Tailored for a posting that emphasizes cost and process efficiency: "Cut fulfillment errors 40% by redesigning intake workflows across two warehouse sites — the largest process improvement the team shipped that year."
Tailored for a posting that emphasizes team leadership: "Trained and onboarded six team leads on a redesigned intake workflow across two warehouse sites, while cutting fulfillment errors 40%."

Same project, same numbers, different lead — because the two postings are screening for different things. That is tailoring: moving your strongest, most relevant bullets to the top of each section and adjusting which half of a true sentence comes first. It is not inventing experience, and it is not deleting a role to paper over a gap; your employment history should stay complete no matter which version of the resume a given posting sees. Doing this by hand for one or two applications a week is entirely manageable with the job posting open in a second tab. If you are doing it across a dozen applications, it is also the specific thing our Targeted Applications tool automates — reordering and rewording against a posting without ever adding anything you did not actually do.