What Should Be Included in a Resume: The Complete Section-by-Section Guide

A resume has one job: get you to a conversation. Recruiters spend only a few seconds on each one, so every line has to earn its place. The short answer to what should be included in a resume is five core sections — contact information, a headline or summary, work experience with quantified bullets, skills, and education — plus optional sections when they help your case.

The core sections, in order:

• Contact information — name, phone, professional email, city/state, LinkedIn
• Headline or summary — a two-line snapshot of who you are and what you do
• Work experience — roles in reverse chronological order, each with quantified bullets
• Skills — the tools and abilities the job actually asks for
• Education — degrees, school, graduation year (placement depends on experience level)

Optional sections — certifications, projects, volunteer work, awards — earn a spot only when they strengthen your fit. The rest of this guide walks through each section, what to leave off, how to survive the applicant tracking system, and how to tailor the whole thing per role.

The five core sections every resume needs

These five are non-negotiable. Skipping any of them, or burying them, is one of the fastest ways to get filtered out. According to MIT's Career Advising & Professional Development guidance, the experience section is where the substance of your resume lives — but it only works if the sections around it are clean and easy to scan.

Contact information

List your full name, phone number, a professional email address, and your city and state. Add a LinkedIn URL — recruiters expect it. Skip the full street address; "Austin, TX" is enough, and a complete mailing address is a minor privacy risk with no upside.

Use a real email — firstname.lastname@gmail.com, not the address you made in middle school. If the role is remote or you're open to relocating, say so in a short line rather than leaving the recruiter to guess.

Headline or professional summary

Below your name, write two or three lines that tell the reader who you are. A headline is a single line ("Senior Backend Engineer — Distributed Systems, Go, Kubernetes"). A summary expands that into two or three sentences covering your focus, your strongest results, and what you're looking for.

Both beat the old objective statement, which mostly restated what you wanted rather than what you offer. The exception: career changers and recent grads, where a short objective can frame an otherwise thin history. If that's you, our resume objective examples walk through how to write one that adds information instead of filler.

Work experience

This is the heart of the resume. List roles in reverse chronological order — most recent first — with company, title, location, and dates. Under each, write three to five bullets that lead with an action verb and, wherever possible, a number.

The difference between a weak and a strong bullet is almost always quantification:

• Weak: "Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts."
• Strong: "Grew Instagram following from 4K to 22K in 11 months by shipping a daily short-form video schedule."

Harvard's career services guide puts it plainly: be specific rather than general, active rather than passive, and show results. Numbers, percentages, dollar amounts, and timeframes do that work for you.

Skills

A dedicated skills section does two jobs: it gives a human a fast snapshot, and it gives the ATS clean keywords to match. Group skills by type — technical tools, software, languages, certifications — and name specific tools rather than vague categories. "Excel (pivot tables, Power Query)" beats "Microsoft Office." For roles that lean technical, our breakdown of computer skills for a resume covers what to list and how.

Education

Include your degree, field of study, school, and graduation year. Recent grads and students should place this near the top, because school is your strongest credential so far. Experienced professionals move it to the bottom — your last decade of work matters more than where you went fifteen years ago. Drop your GPA once you're a few years out; nobody is asking.

Optional sections — and when they actually help

Optional sections are exactly that: include one only when it strengthens your case for *this* role. A cluttered resume full of weak extras reads worse than a tight one without them.

MIT's guide notes that experience doesn't have to mean paid jobs — internships, leadership roles, class projects, competitions, and personal projects all count, especially early in a career. A strong projects section can carry a resume when the work history is thin.

What to leave off your resume

Knowing what to cut is half the skill. These belong nowhere on a modern resume:

• Photos. Standard in some countries, but in the US they invite bias claims and confuse the ATS parser. Leave them off.
• Age, birth date, gender, marital status, religion. None of it is relevant, and most of it is illegal for employers to consider. Harvard's guide explicitly says to omit photos, age, and gender.
• Full street address. City and state are enough.
• "References available upon request." Everyone knows this. It wastes a line — MIT's guidance lists it among the things to drop.
• Irrelevant jobs. Your high-school summer job has no place on a resume ten years into a career. Cut roles that don't support the story you're telling.
• Salary history. Save it for the negotiation, never the resume.
• An unprofessional email or personal pronouns. Skip "I" and "we" — bullets are understood to be about you.

The throughline: every line should help a recruiter say yes. If a detail doesn't, it's taking up space a better one could use.

ATS and keywords: writing for the parser first

Nearly all mid-to-large employers run resumes through an applicant tracking system before a human sees them. The system parses your resume into structured fields and matches it against the job description. A few rules keep you on the right side of it:

• Mirror the job's wording. If the posting says "Salesforce," write "Salesforce" — not "CRM software." If it says "project management," use that exact phrase. The résumé entry on Wikipedia notes that modern resumes emphasize keywords that match employer requirements, with acronyms and credentials spelled out fully to aid automated scanning.
• Spell out acronyms once. Write "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" so both forms get matched.
• Keep the layout simple. Tables, multi-column designs, text boxes, and graphics often parse incorrectly. A clean, single-column layout in .docx or .pdf is safest.
• Use a real Skills section. Skills sprinkled only inside bullets parse less reliably than a dedicated, labeled section.

Write for the parser first and the human second — but write for both. Keyword-stuffing that reads like robot text passes the filter and then loses the recruiter ten seconds later.

Formatting, length, and tailoring per role

Length. One page is the default, and for most people it's the right call. MIT's guidance is to stick to one page unless you have extensive experience or an advanced degree; two pages is fine once you have ten-plus years of relevant history. Never pad to fill a second page or shrink the font to cram everything onto one.

Formatting basics:

• Reverse chronological order within each section — most recent first
• A conservative font no smaller than 10pt, with at least half-inch margins
• Consistent styling: if one job title is bold, they all are
• Generous white space so the page is scannable, not a wall of text
• Export to PDF to lock the formatting, unless the posting asks for .docx

Tailoring per role is the single highest-leverage habit. A generic resume sent to twenty jobs underperforms one resume rewritten for each. For every application, reread the posting, pull the skills and keywords it emphasizes, and reorder your bullets so the most relevant experience sits up top. You don't rewrite from scratch — you re-weight. If you want a second opinion before you send, an AI resume review can flag gaps and weak bullets fast.

Frequently asked questions

What are the most important sections of a resume? Contact information, work experience, skills, and education are the four every resume needs, usually with a headline or summary near the top. Work experience carries the most weight — that's where you prove what you can do, ideally with quantified results.

Should a resume be one page or two? One page is the standard, and right for most people, especially under ten years of experience. Two pages are fine once you have extensive relevant history or an advanced degree. Quality beats length — never pad to fill space.

Do I really need a summary or objective? A short summary or headline frames everything that follows in two or three lines. An objective statement mostly helps career changers and recent grads who need to explain their direction. Experienced candidates get more value from a summary that leads with results.

How do I get my resume past an ATS? Mirror the exact keywords from the job description, spell out acronyms once, use a clean single-column layout without tables or graphics, and include a clearly labeled Skills section. Submit as .pdf or .docx unless told otherwise.

What should I never put on a resume? Leave off photos, your age or birth date, marital status, full street address, salary history, "references available upon request," and any job that doesn't support the role you're targeting. Each of those wastes space or invites bias.

Get your resume in front of the right person

A resume gets you to the door. What gets you through it is a 15-minute conversation with the person doing the hiring — and that rarely starts with the apply button. Articuler is built to find that person: semantic search across 980M+ professional profiles to surface the actual hiring manager behind a posting, a Playbook on what they care about, and AI-drafted outreach that earns roughly 8x the reply rate of a generic cold email. Polish the resume, then go reach the human who decides. If you want the broader playbook, start with our guide on how to get a job.