Resume tower · floor

What to put on a resume, and what to leave off it

Most answers to what to put on a resume are somebody’s preference presented as a standard. There is a better source, and it is a strange one to find on this subject: an employer publishing instructions to its own applicants, in public, with a list of what not to send.

Two of those entries are worth pausing on. The hours per week is unusual outside government applications and it is quietly useful anywhere: it distinguishes two years full time from two years of Saturdays, and a reader who cannot tell will assume the less impressive one. And the instruction about dates is specific — “include the month and year” — because a year alone reads as a gap being smoothed over, which is the opposite of what you intended.

The harder question is not which sections exist but what goes inside them, and the same source gives a formula for that too.

Two or three bullets in that shape under each recent role does more than any amount of adjective. The federal guidance adds the discipline that makes them land: “Use concise, results-focused language. Use numbers, percentages, dollars or descriptions to highlight your accomplishments” — and crucially, “focus on the work experience that is most relevant to the job you’re applying for”, with the instruction to “remove or deprioritize outdated or unrelated work experience”.

The sections almost everybody includes and almost nobody needs. An objective statement describing what you want, which uses the most valuable space on the page to talk about yourself rather than about the job. “References available on request”, which has been assumed for decades. A full postal address, where a city is sufficient and the rest is data you have handed over for no return. And a skills list of qualities nobody can check — that one has its own floor in this tower, because it is the most padded section on most résumés.

A summary at the top, on the other hand, usually earns its place — provided it is about the match rather than about your ambitions. Three lines saying what you do, the strongest evidence you have that you do it, and what you are moving towards. That is the part a reader uses to decide whether to read the rest, and it is the one place on the document where writing well pays immediately.

Order. Contact details, then a short summary if you use one, then work experience in reverse chronological order, then education, then anything checkable — certifications, languages, tools named in the advert. Education moves above experience only while it is the strongest thing you have, which for most people is true for about two years after finishing and false thereafter.

One caveat about the source, stated plainly because the page is built on it. USAJOBS is a US federal application system, and some of its rules are specific to that context — the two-page limit, the series and grade for federal roles, the grade point average requirement. The parts quoted above are the ones that transfer: what belongs in a work entry, the sentence pattern for describing it, and the list of what not to include. Where a rule is federal rather than general, this floor says so, and the floor on résumé length covers the limits that are not.

The rest of this page — the sections to drop, the case for a summary, the ordering — is our judgement rather than anybody’s published rule, and it is marked here rather than presented as received wisdom. The two things that are quoted are quoted with the date they were read.

What this tower will not do

It will not give you a template. The include list above is short enough to work from directly, and a template is where the sections nobody needs come back in.

It will not tell you a photograph is a style choice. An employer publishes it as something not to send, and the commission that enforces the law publishes why.

And it will not sell you a résumé builder, which is what two of the pages currently ranking for this question are for. What holds instead is simple: the include and leave-out lists and the sentence pattern on this page are quoted from a United States government application system, with the date it was read, and the parts that are our judgement are marked in the text.