A resume has one job: to get you a conversation. It is not a complete history of everything you have ever done, and it is not the place to explain yourself. It is a short, scannable argument that you can do the job being advertised. Most resumes get well under a minute of human attention, and many are read by software before a person sees them at all. This guide covers the three resume formats, what belongs in each section, how to get through an applicant tracking system, and the mistakes that quietly get resumes discarded.
The Three Resume Formats
Which format you choose depends on how much relevant experience you have and whether you are staying in your field or changing direction.
- Chronological — every job listed newest first, with titles, dates, and what you accomplished in each. This is the default, and it is what most hiring managers expect. It works best when you have several years in the field and your titles show increasing responsibility.
- Functional (skills-based) — organized by skill rather than by employer, with a short employment list at the end. Useful when you are changing careers, when your relevant abilities came from school, volunteering, or a side business, or when a chronological listing would repeat the same duties five times. Be aware that some recruiters distrust this format because it can hide gaps, so use it deliberately.
- Combination — a short skills-and-achievements summary at the top, followed by a normal chronological history. This is what most career counselors now recommend, because it answers “what can you do” and “where have you been” in the order a reader wants them.
Separately from format, there is targeting. A targeted resume is any of the three above, rewritten for one specific job posting. If you have skills that fit two different occupations, you need two different resumes, not one that tries to cover both. A resume that tries to appeal to everyone reads as though it was written for no one.
What Goes in Each Section
- Contact information — name, phone, professional email address, city and state, and a LinkedIn URL if yours is current. A full street address is no longer expected.
- Summary — two or three lines naming what you do and what you are looking for. The old “career objective” that described what you wanted has largely been replaced by a summary of what you offer.
- Experience — employer, title, dates, and three to five bullets each. Lead each bullet with a verb and end it with a result.
- Skills — the concrete, checkable ones: software, certifications, languages, equipment, licenses. Skip “hard worker” and “team player,” which every resume claims and none proves.
- Education — school, credential, and year. Recent graduates can put this above experience; after a few years in the workforce it belongs at the bottom.
Write Bullets That Show a Result
The single biggest improvement most resumes need is replacing duties with outcomes. A duty describes the job description you were handed; an outcome describes what changed because you were the one doing it.
- Weak: “Responsible for scheduling staff.”
- Better: “Built the weekly schedule for 14 staff across two shifts, cutting overtime hours by about 20% over six months.”
- Weak: “Handled customer complaints.”
- Better: “Resolved roughly 30 customer issues a week; store’s complaint escalations dropped from 8 a month to 2.”
You do not need a corporate metrics dashboard to do this. Counts, frequencies, dollar amounts, time saved, and error rates are all available to anyone who thinks about their own work for ten minutes. If you genuinely cannot measure something, describe the scope instead — how many people, how much money, how often.
Getting Past the Applicant Tracking System
Most medium and large employers run submitted resumes through an applicant tracking system (ATS) that parses your document into fields and lets a recruiter search it. Your resume is not usually “rejected by a robot” outright, but a document the software cannot read properly will be searched badly, and a resume that never surfaces in a search is functionally invisible.
- Use the words in the job posting. If the posting says “accounts payable,” do not write only “AP.” If it says “project coordination,” use that phrase where it is honestly true of your work. This is the modern version of the old advice about keywords, and it still matters — but the words have to describe something you actually did.
- Keep the layout simple. Standard headings (“Experience,” “Education,” “Skills”), one column, no text boxes, no tables, no graphics, and no putting your contact details inside a header or footer where the parser may not look.
- Send the format they ask for. If the posting names one, follow it. If it does not, a PDF preserves your layout for the human reader and is handled fine by current systems; a .docx is the safe fallback when an application portal specifically wants an editable file.
- Name the file usefully — Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, not resume-final-v3.pdf.
Posting Your Resume Online
Having your resume findable online is now part of a normal job search, but it is worth being deliberate about where it goes and how much it says.
- Keep a complete LinkedIn profile and treat it as the public version of your resume. Recruiters search it directly.
- Watch your privacy. Never include a Social Security number, date of birth, or a photo of your ID on a resume or job site profile. Those are not requested by legitimate employers before an offer, and resume sites are a known target for identity-theft scams.
- Consider who can see it. If you are employed and job hunting quietly, most job sites let you hide your profile from your current employer or make it visible only to recruiters you contact. Use those settings before you upload.
- Watch for fake postings. If a “recruiter” asks for bank details, a fee, or a copy of your driver’s license before you have interviewed, it is a scam. See our guide on avoiding work-from-home and job scams.
Mistakes That Quietly Cost You
- Typos. Read it aloud, then have someone else read it. Spell check does not catch “manager” written as “manger.”
- One resume for every application. Rewriting the summary and reordering bullets to match the posting takes fifteen minutes and is the highest-return fifteen minutes in a job search.
- Length for its own sake. One page is normal early in a career; two is fine once you have a decade of relevant work. Three is almost never read.
- Unexplained gaps. You do not owe anyone your medical history, but a line such as “2023–2024: full-time caregiver” stops a reader from inventing a worse explanation.
- Decoration. Colored paper, unusual fonts, and elaborate templates get a resume noticed the way a stain does.
- Anything untrue. Dates, titles, and degrees are routinely verified in a background check, and a discovered exaggeration ends the process at any stage — including after you are hired.
Before You Send It
Run one final pass: does the top third of page one make it obvious you can do this specific job? Does every bullet contain a result? Have you used the posting’s own vocabulary honestly? Is the file named after you? If all four are yes, send it — and then spend your remaining effort on the search itself, because the resume is what gets read after something else brings you to someone’s attention.