How to Write a Résumé, Step by Step

TL;DR — A résumé is six blocks in a fixed order: contact header, a short summary, experience, education, skills, and optional extras like projects. Write every experience line as action verb + specific task + result, put a real number in it wherever one honestly exists, keep it to one page early in your career, and do one tailoring pass against the actual posting before you send it. A complete worked example is below.

Most résumé advice is a pile of adjectives — be concise, be impactful, be professional — which helps exactly zero percent when you're staring at a blank document. This guide is the opposite: the order of operations, section by section, the sentence patterns to use, the rewrites that turn a duty into an accomplishment, and a finished résumé you can hold yours up against. Work top to bottom and you'll have a real draft in about an hour.

What sections does a résumé need, and in what order?

Six blocks, in a near-fixed order:

1. Contact header — name and how to reach you.
2. Summary — two to four lines framing who you are for this job.
3. Experience — jobs, internships, and substantial projects, most recent first.
4. Education — degree, school, graduation date.
5. Skills — the concrete, searchable ones.
6. Optional blocks — Projects, Leadership, Certifications, Publications.

The one real variable is where Education sits. UC San Diego's Career Center puts it plainly: "Order your sections by relevance to the job. For most students, Education should come before Experience and after your Summary." Once you have a year or two of relevant work, flip it: Experience up top, Education at the bottom for the rest of your career.

Everything inside each section runs in reverse chronological order, newest first — which is also what the software reads best. UT Austin's career services notes that "Both ATS and recruiters work better with experience organized chronologically."

What goes in the contact header?

Name, phone, professional email, city and state, and one link — usually a LinkedIn profile or portfolio. That's it. Yale's Office of Career Strategy is direct about the address: "It is not necessary to include your street address." City and state answer the commute question a recruiter is actually asking.

Two mechanical things people get wrong:

• Put the header in the body of the document, not in Word's header area. Some parsers skip that layer entirely, and a résumé with no phone number is a résumé nobody calls.
• Use an email address you'd read aloud in an interview. Firstname.lastname is fine forever.

Do you need a résumé summary?

Yes, if you can write a specific one. No, if all you can manage is "hardworking professional seeking opportunities to grow." A generic summary is worse than none: it burns the most valuable real estate on the page. Purdue's Online Writing Lab notes that readers "typically read anything in quadrant 1 first. So, you should put your most important information—anything you want the employer to see first—in this quadrant."

Keep it to "a short (2-4 lines) overview," in UC San Diego's phrasing, or in UT Dallas's version, "two to four statements." Three ingredients:

1. What you are — the role or field, plus scale ("two years supporting a 40-person sales team").
2. Your single best number — steal it from your top bullet. Repetition at the top is a feature, not a bug.
3. What you're pointed at — the role you're applying for, named in its own words.

Rewrite the third line for every application; the first two can stay.

How do you write an experience bullet?

There's a formula, and it's worth memorizing. UC San Diego states it as: "Action Verb + Specific Task + Purpose or Result." Start with the verb, name the concrete thing, land on what changed.

The failure mode is describing your job description instead of your work. Harvard's career services lists "using passive language instead of 'action' words" and "not demonstrating results" among the top résumé mistakes, and asks for writing that's "Specific rather than general" and "fact-based (quantify and qualify)."

Here's what that looks like. The "before" line is what people actually type first:

Before: "Responsible for scheduling."

After: "Rebuilt the weekly dispatch schedule for a 40-person team, cutting publish time from 6 hours to 45 minutes."

Before: "Helped with invoices."

After: "Reduced average invoice turnaround from 9 days to 4 by standardizing the intake form and clearing exceptions daily."

Before: "Team player who wears many hats."

After: "Trained 7 new hires on the dispatch and billing systems, and wrote the 4-page onboarding doc the team still uses."

Before: "Good with customers."

After: "Handled 60+ calls and chats per shift while holding a 94% satisfaction score."

Notice what changed in every one: a verb that means something, an object with a number attached, and a consequence. Nothing was invented — the same person did the same work. It was just described as work instead of as a duty.

Aim for three to five bullets on your most relevant role and two on older ones. Past five, the reader stops distinguishing them.

How do you quantify a bullet if you never tracked numbers?

Almost everyone thinks they have no numbers, and almost everyone is wrong — they're looking for percentages instead of counts. Ask four questions of any task:

• How many? People trained, tickets closed, events run, articles written, accounts managed.
• How often? Per shift, per week, per semester. "60+ calls per shift" is a number.
• How big? Budget, team size, audience, the dollar value of what you touched.
• What was it before? Any before-and-after: nine days to four, six hours to forty-five minutes, three no-shows a week to zero.

If a figure is an estimate, round it and be ready to explain how you got there. Never manufacture one. Every number on the page is a question you've volunteered to answer out loud later — which is exactly how it comes back at you in a behavioral interview.

If your experience section still feels thin, the honest fix is scope, not padding: coursework, class projects, clubs, and volunteering all belong in Experience when the work is real. The long version of that is in how to write a résumé with no work experience.

Where does education go, and what belongs in it?

Degree and major, institution, graduation date (or expected date). List degrees newest first, and drop high school once you have any college.

On GPA, UT Dallas gives the cleanest rule: "Include your GPA if it is a 3.0/4.0 or better." Below that, leave it off — omitting it is unremarkable, listing a low one invites the wrong conversation. Students and recent grads should add one line of relevant coursework: it's often the only place on a first résumé where the posting's technical vocabulary honestly appears.

What should the skills section contain?

Concrete, checkable things: software, languages, tools, certifications, techniques. Not adjectives. "Excel (pivot tables, Power Query), SQL, NetSuite, Spanish (conversational)" is a skills section. "Communication, leadership, detail-oriented" is a horoscope.

Write each one exactly as the job posting writes it. Applicant tracking systems are, as UT Austin describes them, "the software that many employers use to collect, rank, sort, and review resumes before an actual recruiter or hiring manager does" — and "the ATS compares your resume with the position description that you applied for." A recruiter searching for "JavaScript" does not find "JS." That mechanic, and the formatting that quietly breaks it, is covered in résumé keywords and ATS.

The hard limit: nothing goes in the skills list that you can't point to inside a bullet. A skill claimed but never evidenced reads as padding, then becomes a trap in the interview.

A full worked example

The whole method assembled — a candidate with two years' experience applying for an operations coordinator role:

MAYA OKONKWO
Columbus, OH | [email protected] | (614) 555-0148 | linkedin.com/in/mayaokonkwo

SUMMARY
Operations assistant with two years supporting a 40-person regional dispatch
team. Rebuilt the scheduling and invoicing workflows the team runs on today,
cutting invoice turnaround from 9 days to 4. Looking for an operations
coordinator role where process design is the job, not the side project.

EXPERIENCE
Operations Assistant — Brightline Logistics, Columbus, OH
June 2024 – Present
- Rebuilt the weekly dispatch schedule for a 40-person team, cutting publish
  time from 6 hours to 45 minutes.
- Reduced average invoice turnaround from 9 days to 4 by standardizing the
  intake form and clearing exceptions daily.
- Reconciled $2.1M in annual carrier spend against monthly statements,
  catching $14K in duplicate charges in the first two quarters.
- Trained 7 new hires on the dispatch and billing systems, and wrote the
  4-page onboarding doc the team still uses.

Customer Service Representative — Talbot Home Supply, Columbus, OH
Aug 2022 – May 2024 (part-time during coursework)
- Handled 60+ calls and chats per shift while holding a 94% satisfaction score.
- Wrote 20 canned responses for the most common billing questions, adopted
  team-wide and cutting average handle time by roughly 30 seconds.

EDUCATION
B.S. Business Administration — The Ohio State University, May 2024
GPA 3.6 | Coursework: Operations Management, Business Analytics, Supply Chain

SKILLS
Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, Power Query) | SQL (basic) | NetSuite | Asana |
Google Sheets | Invoice reconciliation | Vendor communication | Process
documentation

Four things are doing the work there. The summary lifts its number straight from the top bullet, so the first line a recruiter reads is already evidence. Every bullet opens on a verb — rebuilt, reduced, reconciled, trained, handled, wrote. The numbers are ordinary — a headcount, a page count, a turnaround — not a wall of invented percentages. And the skills are searchable nouns, each traceable to a bullet above it.

It also fits on one page, single column, no tables or graphics — the format that survives being parsed.

How do you tailor a résumé to one job?

Sending the same file to forty postings is the most common reason a decent résumé gets nothing back. Purdue's OWL treats tailoring as research: read the company's mission statement, which "will illustrate the goals and objectives of the organization", and mine the posting for its key words — the "words that signal what an employer considers important or essential in hiring for a position." UC San Diego names the mechanism: "Use keywords and phrases from the job description. This will help the recruiter visualize you in the role and match ATS criteria."

A tailoring pass takes about ten minutes:

1. Pull the posting's must-haves — the three to six things it leads with, repeats, or files under Requirements.
2. Point each one at a specific line on your résumé. A must-have with nothing behind it is a real gap, and knowing that before you apply beats any match score.
3. Swap your wording for theirs wherever both are true. If they say "vendor management" and you wrote "supplier relations," use theirs.
4. Rewrite the last line of the summary to name the role and the problem it exists to solve.
5. Reorder your bullets so the most relevant one is first under each job. Nobody reads the fourth bullet as carefully as the first.

Doing that by hand forty times is genuinely tedious, which is the honest argument for tailoring with AI — as long as you read every changed line and can defend it. And it only pays off aimed at real, open roles: if that's your harder problem, start with where to find entry-level jobs.

What should you leave off a résumé?

Yale's formatting guidance names the big ones outright — avoid "including a picture or personal information such as marital status, sex, age, or religious affiliation." Add to that list:

• "References available upon request." It's assumed, and it costs you a line. Keep references on a separate document, as UT Dallas advises, and send it when asked.
• An objective statement that's about you. "Seeking a challenging role that leverages my skills" tells the reader nothing. Use the summary instead.
• Skill bars, dot ratings, and icons. Four out of five dots is not information, and a parser can't read text inside an image.
• Every job you've ever had. After a few years, relevance beats completeness.
• Anything you can't defend out loud. That's the whole test.

How long should a résumé be, and how should it look?

One page, early on. Yale's standard is one page for undergraduates, "1-2 pages for Master's students, and 2-3 pages maximum for PhDs and postdocs." UT Dallas allows the same exception for everyone else: "a resume should be a maximum of one page, but if you possess extensive experience directly relevant to your career goals or the job you are applying to, then a resume over one page long is appropriate."

The rest of the physical spec, from Yale: margins no smaller than 0.5 inch, font size between 10-12 points, a standard readable typeface, black and white. Purdue's OWL supplies the reason it matters — "Employers will usually take, at most, only thirty-five seconds to look at this one-page representation of yourself before deciding whether to keep or discard it." That's not cause for panic. It's the reason the best thing about you belongs in the top third of the page.

The last pass before you send it

• Every bullet starts with a verb, and none starts with "Responsible for."
• At least half your bullets contain a number you could explain in an interview.
• The summary's last line names this role.
• The posting's exact wording appears wherever it's honestly true.
• One column, standard headings, no tables or graphics, contact info in the body.
• Dates are consistent — same format, no unexplained gaps.
• File name is Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, not resume-final-v3.pdf.
• You read it out loud once, and it sounded like a person.

That last one catches more than any spellchecker. A résumé is a short, factual argument that you've already done a version of the job being advertised. Get the argument right and the formatting takes care of itself.

Sources

• Yale University Office of Career Strategy — Resume Formatting
• Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Career Services — Create a Strong Resume
• Purdue University Online Writing Lab — Résumé Design
• Purdue University Online Writing Lab — Determining Audience
• UC San Diego Career Center — Resume Guide
• The University of Texas at Dallas University Career Center — Building a Resume
• The University of Texas at Austin, College of Natural Sciences Career Services — Applicant Tracking Systems