How to write a resume, section by section

Before you write anything

The most common resume mistake happens before the first word: writing one document and sending it everywhere. A resume that is not aimed at a particular kind of role has to be vague to cover all of them, and vague is exactly what gets filtered out.

Start with the job posting. Read three or four adverts for the role you actually want and note what repeats. The repeated items are the job's real requirements — the rest is the hiring manager's wish list. Those repeated requirements are what your resume needs to answer, in roughly the order the posting cares about them.

Then write down, in plain language, the three things you most want a reader to conclude. "I have shipped production software in a team." "I have managed a budget." "I have handled customers directly." Everything in the finished document should be earning one of those three conclusions. If a line does not, it is taking space from a line that would.

Contact details

This should be boring and correct. Name, phone number, professional email address, city, and a link to a LinkedIn or portfolio if it is current and worth reading.

Things to leave out: your full postal address (city is enough, and street addresses are a privacy risk on a document you email to strangers), your date of birth, marital status, your father's name, and a passport-style photograph. Several of these are still traditional on Indian resumes, and many employers now strip them to reduce bias exposure. Leaving them off costs you nothing.

Use an email address you would be comfortable reading aloud in an interview. If your current address was created when you were fifteen, make a new one — it takes two minutes and it is the first thing on the page.

Do not put your contact details in a header or footer. Applicant tracking systems frequently do not read those regions of a document, and a resume that parses without a phone number is a resume nobody can call. The ATS guide covers why in more detail.

The summary, and when to skip it

A summary is two to four lines at the top explaining who you are professionally and what you are aiming at. It is genuinely useful in three situations: you are changing field and your history needs a frame; you are returning after a break; or your job titles will not mean anything to this employer.

Outside those cases, a summary is often the weakest content on the page, because it is where people write things that cannot be verified. "Results-driven professional with excellent communication skills and a passion for excellence" tells a reader nothing and quietly signals that the rest may be padded too.

Compare:

Weak: Hard-working and detail-oriented team player seeking a challenging position in a reputed organisation where I can utilise my skills and grow with the company.

Better: Support engineer moving into data analysis. Three years handling escalations for a SaaS product, the last year building the SQL reporting the support team now runs on. Looking for an analyst role on a product team.

The second one is specific, checkable, and explains a career change that the job titles alone would make look random. That is what a summary is for. Note also what it does not do: it does not claim to be hard-working. Nobody says otherwise about themselves, so the claim carries no information.

Work experience: the section that decides it

This is where the decision gets made. Everything else supports it.

List roles newest first. For each one: job title, employer, location, and dates as month and year. Then bullets — three to six for recent and relevant roles, one or two for older ones. Use months, not just years: "2023–2024" could be fourteen months or two, and a reader who has to guess will guess unkindly.

Write results, not responsibilities

The single highest-value edit available to most resumes is converting duty statements into outcomes. A duty describes what you were assigned. An outcome describes what changed because you did it.

A workable pattern is: action verb + what you did + the effect. Start with a verb — built, cut, negotiated, migrated, trained — not with "responsible for" or "worked on". Both of those describe proximity to work rather than work.

What to do when you have no numbers

Plenty of real work does not produce a metric, and inventing one is worse than not having one. If you cannot quantify, qualify instead: state the scope, the difficulty, or the outcome in words.

• Scope: "Sole designer for a team of nine engineers" — no number needed to convey the load.
• Difficulty: "Migrated a fifteen-year-old payroll system with no documentation and no downtime window."
• Outcome in words: "Rewrote the onboarding emails; support stopped receiving 'how do I log in' tickets."

Never estimate a number you could be asked to defend. "Increased sales by 40%" invites the question "from what baseline, over what period?" — and if you cannot answer that in an interview, the bullet has cost you more than it gained.

Handling gaps and short stints

Gaps are far more normal than resume advice implies, and hiding one usually draws more attention than explaining it. A single line is enough: "Career break — family care, 2024" or "Sabbatical; completed AWS certification". You are not obliged to explain your health or family circumstances, but leaving an unexplained two-year hole invites the reader to invent something.

For short stints, a brief clarification helps where the reason is external: "role ended when the team was dissolved", "six-month contract, completed". A pattern of short unexplained roles is a genuine concern for employers, so if there is a benign reason, say it.

Skills

Keep this factual and scannable. Concrete, checkable skills earn their place: languages, frameworks, tools, platforms, certifications, spoken languages. Group them so a reader can find what they came for — "Languages: Python, SQL, JavaScript" reads faster than a twenty-item alphabetical run.

Cut the unverifiable adjectives. "Team player", "hard worker", "excellent communication skills" and "attention to detail" appear on almost every resume, which is precisely why they carry no weight. If your communication is genuinely a strength, prove it in an experience bullet — "presented quarterly results to the board" — rather than asserting it in a list.

Skip self-assessed proficiency bars and percentages. A five-star rating you awarded yourself is not evidence, and "Python: 80%" raises the question of what the missing 20% is. State the skill; let the experience section demonstrate the depth.

Only list what you would be comfortable being tested on in the interview. Padding this section with technologies you have read about is the fastest way to lose credibility once someone asks a follow-up.

Education

Degree, institution, and year of completion. Add your grade if it is strong or if the employer asks — many graduate schemes in India and the UK screen on it explicitly.

The placement of this section should change over your career. As a student or recent graduate, education goes near the top: it is your main evidence. Once you have two or three years of relevant work, it moves to the bottom, because your experience is now the stronger argument. Plenty of experienced candidates leave a full education block at the top out of habit and push their best material onto page two.

Coursework, projects and thesis titles are worth including only while they are your strongest evidence, or when they are directly relevant to the role. Once you have shipped real work, real work wins.

Optional sections

Add these only when they strengthen the argument. Each one costs space that experience could be using.

• Projects — valuable for students, career changers and developers. Include what it does, what you built it with, and a link if it is live.
• Certifications — worth listing when the field cares (cloud, security, accounting, project management). Include the issuing body and year.
• Publications or talks — for research, academic and senior technical roles.
• Volunteering — useful when it demonstrates relevant skills or fills a gap in your timeline.
• Languages — list them where the role or the region makes it relevant, with a realistic level.

Leave out hobbies unless they are genuinely relevant or unusual enough to be memorable. "Reading, music, travelling" is filler. Also drop the "References available on request" line — it is assumed, and it wastes a line you could use.

If you have no experience yet

You have more material than you think; it is just not labelled as employment. Reframe the document around evidence rather than job titles.

• Coursework and academic projects — describe them as work: the problem, your approach, the result.
• Internships and training — however short, they show you have worked to someone else's deadline.
• Freelance and personal projects — a live link is stronger evidence than a bullet point.
• Positions of responsibility — organising an event or running a college society is coordination and budgeting experience.
• Part-time work outside your field — retail and hospitality demonstrate reliability and customer handling. It counts.

Put education and projects above experience while that is your best evidence, and use the summary to state what you are aiming for. Our guide to resume formats for freshers works through a full example.

Formatting and length

The layout has one job: get read. Anything decorative that makes the content harder to scan is working against you.

• One page under about ten years of experience; two once you genuinely have more relevant history than fits.
• One standard font at 10–12pt for body text. Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Garamond and Georgia are all safe.
• Real section headings using conventional names — Experience, Education, Skills. Clever headings like "My Journey" confuse both people and parsers.
• Consistent dates in one format throughout.
• Enough white space that the page does not read as a wall. Shrinking margins to 0.4in to force one page produces something nobody wants to read.
• Single-column layouts are the safest. Two-column designs can look excellent and can also scramble in a parser — see the ATS guide before committing to one.
• PDF export unless asked otherwise, named sensibly: Priya-Sharma-Resume.pdf, not resume-final-v3.pdf.

If you are cutting to fit one page, cut from the oldest roles first, then from bullets that describe duties rather than outcomes. Those are the lowest-value lines on the page by definition.

Final checklist

Before you send it, read it once against this list. Most of these take under a minute to fix.

• Does the top third of page one contain your strongest, most relevant evidence?
• Is every bullet a result rather than a duty, or at least a scope rather than a task?
• Have you removed every unverifiable adjective about yourself?
• Are dates in months and years, in one consistent format?
• Are your contact details in the body of the document rather than a header?
• Does the file name contain your actual name?
• Have you read it aloud once? It catches broken sentences that reading silently does not.
• Has one other person read it? They will find the typo you have stopped seeing.

Then stop editing. A good resume sent to twelve well-chosen employers will outperform a perfect resume sent to three, and past a certain point the polishing is procrastination wearing a productive hat.

Where to go next

Rule out parsing problems with the ATS resume guide, then work through resume tips for line-level edits and resume best practices for the conventions around length, tense and structure. If the application needs a letter, the cover letter guide covers that. For the search itself — targeting roles, handling rejection, interviews — see career advice.

Frequently asked questions