In short
A résumé is one page that lets a stranger decide, in under a minute, whether to talk to you. At the start you do not need more experience on it. You need to show what you have done in plain, specific lines, in a layout that both a person and the software employers use can read. This guide covers what goes where, how to write a line, and what to leave off.
Keep the layout plain
Employers store applications in tracking systems that pull the text out of your file. Greenhouse, one widely used system, says in its own help article that its parser can struggle with scanned pages, tables, columns, headers and footers, and contact details placed in a header. When reading fails, the file stays attached for a person to open, but you want it to read cleanly the first time.
- One column, one page. A second page is fine only when you have a great deal that is relevant, which is not yet.
- Real text, not a picture of text. If you can select the words with your cursor, software can read them.
- Your name, email address and phone number at the top of the page body, not in the header area of the document.
- Ordinary section names: Education, Projects, Leadership and Activities, Work, Skills. Clever names confuse people as well as software.
- A standard font at 10 to 12 points and margins you can see.
- Save as a PDF unless the application asks for Word, and name it
YourName-Resume.pdf.
The parts, in order
- Name and contact. Email, phone, and a city and state if you like. A link to a profile or portfolio only if it is worth reading. No photo, birth date or full home address.
- Education. College, degree and expected graduation month and year. Add a GPA if the application asks or you are glad of it; it is your call. List relevant courses only when you have nothing else to show for the subject.
- Projects or experience, whichever is stronger, first. For a first résumé, projects often are.
- Work. Any paid work, with the same kind of lines as everything else.
- Leadership and activities. Clubs, teams, organizations, with the specific thing you did.
- Skills. Tools and languages you can actually use in conversation. If you would be nervous being asked about it, take it off.
Writing a line
A good line says what you did, how, and what came of it. Start with a plain verb. Add a number where you honestly have one.
| Weak | Better |
|---|---|
| Responsible for helping customers | Helped about 60 customers a day at a grocery store checkout, and trained two new cashiers |
| Worked on a group project | Wrote the survey and analyzed 84 responses for a team project on campus dining; presented the results to a class of 40 |
| Member of the Spanish Club | Organized three conversation nights for 15 to 25 students each, in the Spanish Club |
| Good at Excel | Built a spreadsheet that tracks the weekly budget for a four-person household |
Rules that help:
- Keep to the truth and to the size of what you did. "Helped," "wrote," "organized" and "built" are all honest verbs when they are accurate. Do not stretch a role to sound bigger; interviewers ask follow-up questions, and you will be asked about every line.
- Put what you did before where you did it, when the thing you did is the interesting part.
- Three to five lines per entry at most. Cut anything a reader would not miss.
- Use the same style throughout: tense, punctuation, how you write dates.
Work that does not feel like experience
Paid work in retail, restaurants, warehouses, childcare, cleaning or a family business belongs on a résumé. It shows you can be counted on, and plenty of hiring managers did the same work at your age. Describe it in the same terms as everything else: how many people you served, what you were trusted with, what you learned. If a role is very short or ended badly, you may leave it off. Gaps between roles are normal for students.
What to leave off
- A photo, your age, your marital status. These are not expected in the United States.
- "References available upon request." It is assumed.
- Anything you could not talk about for two minutes.
- Anything that implies work you did not do. If you are unsure how to list something, ask your career office, and see how to put what you do here on a résumé.
Before you send it
- Read it aloud, slowly. Mistakes show up in your voice before they show up on the page.
- Ask one person who knows you and one who does not to read it. Ask what they remember. Whatever they remember is what the reader will remember.
- Open the PDF on your phone. If it looks wrong there, it may look wrong elsewhere.
- Take it to your career office. Many offices read student résumés for free, and they often know what employers who visit your campus prefer.
- Match each version to the posting: move the most relevant project to the top and use some of the same words the posting uses, where they are true of you.
The Workbench has a résumé builder and a checker that run in your browser; nothing you type there is sent to an employer, and it is a fine place to draft. A résumé is a living file. Update it at the end of each term, while you remember the numbers.