How to Make a Resume — Every Section, With Real Examples
A resume has seven jobs to do, in a specific order: identify you, pitch you, prove you, credential you, keyword you, match you to the posting, and survive a proofread. This guide walks through each one with before-and-after examples you can copy.
Before You Start: Gather the Raw Material
Most of the time people "spend writing a resume" is actually spent hunting for facts mid-sentence. Collect these first and the writing takes half as long:
Exact dates and titles
Month and year for every job's start and end, plus the official title on your offer letter — background checks compare against these.
Numbers from each role
Team sizes, budgets, sales figures, volumes handled, percentages improved. Old performance reviews and dashboards are gold mines here.
Credentials, verbatim
Degree names, license numbers, certification titles and dates — exactly as issued, because ATS keyword matching is literal.
2–3 target job postings
Even before applying anywhere, real postings tell you which keywords and requirements your resume must answer. Save them; you'll use them in step 6.
How to Make a Resume in 7 Steps
Before step 1, pick your format — reverse-chronological for most people (the format guide covers the exceptions). Then build the document top to bottom:
Start With Contact Information
Your contact block needs exactly five things: full name, phone number, a professional email address, your city and state, and a LinkedIn URL (or portfolio, for creative and technical roles). Leave out your street address — recruiters haven't mailed anyone a rejection letter in a decade, and full addresses invite location-based screening. Leave out your birthday, marital status, and photo too; in the US these trigger bias-compliance concerns and some companies discard resumes that include them.
Two technical details matter more than they look. First, put this block in the document body, not in the Word header — many applicant tracking systems skip header and footer regions entirely, which means the recruiter sees a parsed candidate with no phone number. Second, make sure the email is one you actually check and reads professionally: firstname.lastname@gmail.com beats anything you created in middle school.
Maria Torres
Austin, TX · (512) 555-0142 · maria.torres@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/mariatorres
Write the Professional Summary
The summary is 2–3 sentences directly under your header, and it's the only part of the resume a recruiter is guaranteed to read. Its formula: who you are professionally + your strongest quantified proof + what you're aiming at. It replaces the outdated "objective statement" — employers know your objective is getting the job; what they want is your value.
Write it last, even though it appears first. After you've drafted the experience section, your two or three most impressive facts become obvious — promote them into the summary. If you have fewer than two years of experience, swap the experience claim for your degree, relevant projects, or internship results; don't inflate.
Strong: "Retail operations manager with 6 years leading stores of 20+ staff. Cut shrinkage 18% and lifted mystery-shopper scores to the top 5% of a 140-store chain. Looking to bring inventory and team-leadership systems to a multi-site operations role."
Build the Work Experience Section
This is 60–70% of your resume's weight. For each role, list job title, employer, location, and dates (month + year), then 3–5 bullet points. The discipline that separates strong resumes from weak ones: every bullet describes an outcome, not a duty. "Responsible for social media" tells the reader what your job description said; "Grew Instagram following from 5K to 45K in 8 months" tells them what happened because you were there.
Use the pattern action verb → what you did → measurable result. Not every bullet needs a number, but each job needs at least one or two. Can't remember exact figures? Honest estimates ("~30%", "roughly 200 tickets/month") are fine and standard practice. Go back 10–15 years at most; older roles compress to a single line or drop off entirely. Use past tense for previous jobs, present tense for your current one — mixing them is one of the most common errors recruiters notice.
Strong: "Resolved 40+ customer escalations weekly with a 92% satisfaction rating, and wrote the returns playbook later adopted by all 6 regional stores."
Add Education — Sized to Your Career Stage
The education section shrinks as your experience grows. A student or recent graduate should place it above work experience and expand it: degree, school, graduation year, GPA if it's 3.5 or higher, plus relevant coursework, honors, and substantial projects. That's your evidence when you don't yet have much employment history — the student guide covers this case in depth.
Five or more years into your career, education drops below experience and compresses to one or two lines per degree — no GPA, no coursework. List your highest degree first. If you didn't finish a degree, you can list completed credits honestly ("Coursework toward B.A. in Economics, 2018–2020"). Never invent or upgrade a credential: degree verification is one of the few things background checks always catch.
New graduate: "B.S. Mechanical Engineering — Purdue University, May 2026 · GPA 3.7
Capstone: designed a low-cost prosthetic knee joint; team of 4, $2K budget, patent pending."
List Skills the Way Machines and Humans Both Read Them
The skills section does double duty: it gives the ATS exact keyword matches, and it gives a skimming human a 3-second capability snapshot. List 8–12 skills as plain text separated by commas or bullets — never as graphic "skill bars" or star ratings, which parse as nothing and quantify nothing.
Prioritize hard skills — tools, software, languages, certifiable techniques — because they're what job postings filter on. Soft skills like "communication" carry almost no weight in a list; if teamwork or leadership is genuinely your strength, prove it with an experience bullet instead ("led a team of 8" beats the word "leadership" every time). Match spelling to the posting: if they write "QuickBooks," don't write "Intuit accounting software."
QuickBooks Online · Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP) · Accounts Payable/Receivable · Payroll (ADP) · Bank Reconciliation · GAAP · SQL basics · Spanish (professional)
Tailor It to the Job Posting
A generic resume loses to a tailored one at both screening stages. The ATS scores you on keyword overlap with the posting; the recruiter scores you on how obviously your last two jobs map onto this one. Tailoring fixes both, and it takes about ten minutes per application once you have a solid master resume.
The process: read the posting and highlight the 5–8 requirements it repeats or lists first — those are the real ones. Then (1) rewrite your summary to speak to that role by name, (2) reorder each job's bullets so the most relevant ones come first, and (3) mirror the posting's exact vocabulary where it's true of you — "stakeholder management," "CNC machining," whatever the language is. Don't fabricate; select and rephrase. Run the result through the ATS checker to verify the keyword match before you submit.
Proofread, Then Export Correctly
Surveys of hiring managers regularly find that a majority will reject a candidate over a single typo — unfair, but cheap to defend against. Spell-check catches spelling; it doesn't catch the errors that matter on resumes: inconsistent date formats ("Jan 2023" vs "01/23"), tense drift, a company name misspelled, or a phone number with a transposed digit. Read the document aloud once, then have one other person read it cold.
Export as PDF unless the posting explicitly asks for Word — PDF locks your layout on every device. Name the file Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf; "resume_final_v3 (2).pdf" is a first impression too. Last check: open the PDF and try to select the text with your cursor. If you can't, the file has no text layer and an ATS will read it as blank.
An Action-Verb Bank for Step 3
Every experience bullet starts with a verb — and "managed" gets exhausted by bullet three. Pick by the kind of result you're claiming:
You grew something
You saved or fixed
You built or launched
You led people
Avoid: "Responsible for," "Duties included," "Helped with," and any first-person pronoun.
The Resume Header, Dissected
The header is the top block of your resume — name, title line, and contact details. It's read first by humans and parsed first by machines, so its anatomy is worth getting exactly right:
- Keep the header in the document body — ATS parsers frequently skip Word's header/footer regions.
- Write "Phone:" and "Email:" as text or use none at all; icon-only labels parse as nothing.
- One header, page one only. On a two-page resume, page two gets just your name and "Page 2".
- No photo on US resumes. (European applications differ — see the Europass guide.)
What Does a Good Resume Look Like?
Hold a strong resume at arm's length and you can tell it's strong before reading a word. These are the visual signatures — and they're measurable:
One column, clear hierarchy
A single column that reads top-to-bottom, with three visible levels: name (largest), section headings (bold, uniform), body text (10.5–12 pt). If a reader can't find "Experience" within one second, the hierarchy failed.
Numbers visible at a glance
Skim a good resume and digits jump out of the bullets — percentages, dollar figures, team sizes, timeframes. A resume with zero numbers reads as a list of duties; aim for a metric in at least a third of your bullets.
Room to breathe
Roughly a quarter of the page is white space: 0.5–1 inch margins, blank space between sections, bullets of one to two lines. A wall of 8 pt text doesn't look thorough — it looks unreadable, so it goes unread.
Ruthlessly consistent
One font. One date format. One bullet symbol. Same bolding pattern on every job title. Consistency is what makes a resume look "professional" — most people sense it without being able to name it.
Exactly one page (usually)
Under 10 years of experience: one full page — not one page plus four orphan lines on page two. Senior candidates earn a second page only when every line on it pulls weight.
Plain, not decorated
No portrait photo, no skill bars, no icons doing a word's job, at most one accent color. Compare polished examples side by side in the resume samples gallery — the strongest ones are always the plainest.
Resume Writing FAQ
How do I make a resume with no work experience?+
Lead with education and treat everything you've actually done as experience: coursework projects, volunteering, clubs, sports leadership, babysitting, a family business. Each can produce outcome bullets ("organized a 12-team fundraiser that raised $3,400"). Skip the summary or keep it to one line about your goal and strongest proof. The students page has full examples.
How do I make a resume for my first job?+
Same seven steps, different emphasis: education first, one page always, and availability stated near the top if you're applying for shift work. First-job employers read for reliability signals — showing up (attendance awards, four years in one club), handling responsibility (cash, keys, younger kids), and basic communication. One tailored paragraph in the application note beats a padded second page every time.
How long does it take to make a resume?+
From scratch in a word processor: plan 3–5 hours for a version worth sending, most of it spent on formatting and phrasing. With the resume builder handling structure and formatting, the same quality takes 15–30 minutes — about 60 seconds for the first draft, the rest for reviewing and tailoring the content.
Do I need a summary, or is that outdated?+
The objective statement ("seeking a challenging position…") is outdated. A 2–3 sentence summary that leads with quantified value is not — it's where you control the recruiter's first impression and the natural place for the target job title, which helps keyword matching. Only skip it if you're a student with nothing concrete to summarize yet.
Should I make my resume in Word, Google Docs, or a builder?+
Whatever you write in, submit a PDF with a clean text layer. Word and Google Docs work but you own every formatting decision, and their templates often use tables and text boxes that break ATS parsing. A dedicated builder pre-solves layout, spacing, and parse-safety so your time goes into content. Already have a document you like? Convert it instead of retyping.
Do I need a different resume for every job?+
A different version, not a different resume. Keep one master document with everything, then for each application adjust the summary, reorder bullets, and mirror the posting's keywords — ten minutes of work that measurably raises both ATS scores and recruiter response rates. Pair each version with a tailored letter from the cover letter AI.
Go Deeper
You bring the facts — AI handles steps 1 through 7
Describe your experience in plain words and get a correctly structured, ATS-safe resume to refine.
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