How to write a resume in 2026

Most resume advice is about formatting. Formatting matters far less than people think. What decides whether you get a call is whether a stranger, skimming for about seven seconds, can tell what you have done and how well.

This is the order to work in.

Write the content before you pick a design

The temptation is to choose a template first, because it feels like progress. Do it the other way round: get the words into a plain document, then pick a layout that fits the amount you have. Choosing the design first quietly pushes you to pad thin sections to fill the space, or to cut good material because it does not fit.

You need five things:

1. Contact details
2. A short summary (optional, but useful more often than not)
3. Work experience
4. Education
5. Skills

Everything else — projects, certifications, languages, volunteering, publications — is added only when it earns its space.

Get the contact block right

More applications die here than anywhere else, because a typo in an email address is invisible to you and fatal.

• Name, then city and country. No full street address; nobody posts letters, and it is a privacy risk on a document you email to strangers.
• A phone number with a country code if you are applying internationally.
• A professional email address. firstname.lastname@ at any provider is fine. An address you made when you were fifteen is not.
• A LinkedIn URL, if the profile is current and matches your resume.
• A portfolio or GitHub link if the work is public and worth opening.

Leave out date of birth, marital status, gender and a photo for US, UK, Canadian and Australian applications. In much of continental Europe, Latin America and Asia a photo is normal — there is a country-by-country breakdown in should you put a photo on your resume.

Choose the section order by what is strongest

The default is reverse-chronological: experience first, most recent at the top. Use it unless you have a reason not to.

Reasons not to:

• You just graduated. Education first, then projects. See writing a resume with no experience.
• You are changing field. A grouped skills section before employment lets a reader see relevant capability before they see irrelevant job titles. The Functional template is built for this.
• You are applying academically. A CV is a different document — see resume vs CV.

Write the experience section properly

This is the section that decides the outcome, and it is where almost everyone writes a job description instead of a record of what they did.

The shape of a good bullet

Result, action, scope. The outcome comes first because the first four or five words are all a skimming reader is guaranteed to see.

Compare:

Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts and creating content.

Grew Instagram from 4k to 31k followers in 14 months by shifting to short-form video, which became the second-largest source of trial signups.

Same job. The first tells you the duties, which the reader could have guessed from the job title. The second tells you what happened, how much, over what period, and why it mattered commercially.

Where the numbers come from

"I do not have numbers" is almost always untrue. You have:

• Volume — tickets, calls, accounts, users, transactions, articles, patients.
• Money — budget, revenue influenced, cost saved, contract values.
• Time — how long something took before and after you changed it.
• People — team size, people trained, stakeholders coordinated.
• Change — any percentage, in either direction, that you moved.

If the exact figure is confidential, give the shape instead: "a seven-figure budget", "a team of eleven", "roughly a 30% reduction". Relative change is almost never sensitive.

How much per role

Three to five bullets on your current role. Two or three on the one before. One or two on anything more than five or six years old. Nobody has been rejected for saying less about a job they left in 2016.

If you did the same job at three companies, do not repeat the same bullets. Say the common part once, then what was different each time.

Then the summary

Write it last, when you know what the resume says. Three or four lines, and it should do one of three jobs:

• Position you when your job titles do not describe your actual work.
• Explain a transition when your history points one way and you are applying another.
• Set level when you are senior enough that the framing matters.

If none of those apply, you can leave it out and lose nothing.

What it must not be: a list of adjectives. "Motivated, detail-oriented team player with excellent communication skills" describes nobody, so it describes you no better than anyone else. There are worked examples in professional summary examples.

Skills: group them, and be honest

One long list of thirty items makes the reader guess what you are actually good at. Group into three or four categories and put the strongest first.

Two rules:

• Only list what you would be happy to be interviewed on. Everything in that section is an invitation.
• No self-ratings. Four stars out of five at Excel is unverifiable and slightly odd. Name the tool.

Education

Once you have a few years of work, this is three lines: degree, institution, dates. Drop your grade unless it is strong or you are early career. Drop secondary school entirely once you have a degree.

Early career it does more work: relevant modules, dissertation title with a result, a cohort rank if it is good.

Match the posting, without stuffing

Read the posting and note the exact phrases it uses for the things you have done. If it says "stakeholder management", use that, not "worked with people across the business". Both parsing software and human readers match on vocabulary.

Spell out an acronym once — "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)" — then use whichever form the posting uses.

What not to do: paste a keyword list at the bottom, or hide white text. Both are detectable and both end the application when a person looks. More on this in resume keywords.

Now pick the format

With the content written you know how much you have, so the choice is easy.

• A person will read it first — an agency, a studio, a startup, a referral. Use a designed layout; it buys you goodwill. See the modern and creative collections.
• Software screens first — a large-company portal, a high-volume graduate scheme. Use a single column and standard headings. See ATS resume templates.
• You cannot tell. Send the plain one. It costs you a little and risks nothing.

Since your content is stored separately from the design in the builder, keeping both versions is a single click rather than two documents to maintain.

Length

One page early career and for most industry roles. Two once you have several roles worth real detail. Longer only for academic CVs and federal applications.

The failure is not length, it is what fills it. A second page of quantified work is fine; a second page of skills lists, hobbies and "references available on request" is worse than a tight single page. More in how long should a resume be.

Check it before you send

Six things, in this order. It takes about five minutes.

1. Read it out loud. You will hear the awkward phrasing you cannot see.
2. Check every date. Overlaps and gaps you did not intend are the most commonly spotted error.
3. Check the company names. Sending a resume that still mentions tailoring for a different employer is a real and common way to lose an application.
4. Do the paste test. Copy the whole PDF, paste it into a plain text editor, read the order. That is roughly what a parser sees.
5. Name the file properly. firstname-lastname-resume.pdf. That filename is what sits in a recruiter's inbox.
6. Have someone else read it. Ideally someone who does not know your work, because they will find the assumptions you cannot see.

What does not matter as much as you think

To be blunt about where not to spend your time:

• The font. Any common, readable typeface is fine.
• Whether it says "Work Experience" or "Professional Experience". Both are standard.
• A single line over one page. Cut a word from a bullet and move on.
• Fancy PDF metadata. Nobody looks.
• Your address. Nobody posts letters.

Spend the time you save on turning duties into results. That change improves a resume more than every formatting decision combined.