The five that always belong
These are not negotiable, and in this order for most people.
- Name and contact details: name, email, phone, city and country. A LinkedIn URL if the profile is current. A portfolio or GitHub if the work is relevant.
- Summary: three sentences naming what you do, at what level, and what you are aiming at. Cut it if it would only restate your job title.
- Experience: every relevant role, reverse-chronological, with title, employer, location and dates. Three to five bullets on recent roles, one or two on older ones.
- Education: degree, institution, graduation year. Below experience unless you graduated within about two years.
- Skills: the specific tools, systems and named competencies for this field. Twelve to twenty, grouped, no ratings.
The four that depend on your field
Certifications deserve their own section when they are a licensing requirement — nursing, accounting, security, project management, trades. Buried inside education, an active RN licence or a CPA is doing a fraction of the work it should.
Projects earn a section when your employment history does not yet demonstrate what you can do: students, career changers, and engineers whose best work is public. A project entry needs the same structure as a job — what you built, what you used, what happened.
Publications, speaking and patents belong on academic, research and senior technical resumes and nowhere else. Volunteering belongs when it shows leadership, when it fills a gap, or when the employer is a nonprofit.
Languages are worth listing when the role is customer-facing, international, or advertised in a country where you would be working in a second language. State a real level — "conversational", "professional working", "native" — rather than a bar chart.
What to take off
Each of these was standard once. None of them helps now, and several actively cost you.
- "References available on request" — universally assumed, and the line spends a whole row saying nothing.
- An objective statement describing what you want from an employer. Replace it with a summary describing what you bring, or delete it.
- Your full street address. City and country is what anyone needs; the rest is an identity-theft surface on a document you email to strangers.
- Date of birth, marital status, nationality and a photo — on a US, UK, Canadian or Australian application. All four are normal in much of continental Europe.
- Skill rating bars. A five-dot meter next to "Python" is a self-assessment against an undefined scale, and no reader can act on it.
- Soft-skill adjectives with nothing behind them: hard-working, detail-oriented, team player, results-driven. Everyone claims them, so they carry no information.
- Jobs from more than fifteen years ago with no bearing on this one, and your high school once you have a degree.
- Anything untrue, including a degree "in progress" that stalled and a job title you gave yourself. This is the one item on the list that ends careers rather than applications.
The test for anything you are unsure about
Ask what a hiring manager would do differently having read it. If the honest answer is nothing, it is decoration. Hobbies usually fail this test — but "volunteer wildfire responder, 6 seasons" passes it easily, because it tells someone you can be relied on under pressure and almost nobody else on the shortlist has it.
The second test is the space test. Everything on the page competes with everything else for the same six seconds. A line is not free because there is room for it; it is charged against the attention available for the line under it. That is why cutting is usually a bigger improvement than adding, and why the strongest resumes tend to be the ones that had the most taken out.
