How to write a resume in 2026: a step-by-step guide with examples

Most people open a template and start filling in boxes. It’s faster to start from the other end: the jobs you want. Save three to five recent ads for the role you’re targeting, at the level you’re aiming for, and read them side by side. Highlight three things in each:

• Requirements that repeat. If four of five ads ask for stakeholder management or Salesforce, it belongs near the top of your resume, provided you have it.
• The words they use. “Customer onboarding” and “client implementation” can describe the same work. Use the term your target employers use.
• The level. Phrases like “own the roadmap” or “support the team” tell you whether to lead with independent results or with reliability and range.

You’ll end up with a short list of what employers in your field care about. For common roles you can skip some of the counting: the customer success manager keywords page, for example, shows what share of live postings mention each skill, and there are similar pages for other roles under resume keywords by role. That list decides what goes first in every section that follows.

For almost everyone, the right structure is reverse-chronological: your most recent job first, with dates, then the one before it. Recruiters expect it, it shows progression at a glance, and applicant tracking systems read it reliably. A hybrid format adds a short skills-led section above the same dated history, which helps career changers and people with varied experience. A purely skills-based (functional) resume that drops the timeline usually raises more questions than it answers. Our guide to resume formats compares all three, with a skeleton for each.

For the layout, plain beats clever:

• One column, with standard headings: Summary, Skills, Experience, Education.
• One readable font such as Calibri, Arial or Georgia at 10.5 to 12 points, and margins of about 2 cm (0.75 inch).
• Contact details in the body of the page, not only in the header, which some systems skip.
• No photo, icons, skill bars or text boxes for US and UK applications.

Here is the skeleton the rest of this guide fills in:

FIRSTNAME LASTNAME
Target job title | one or two specialisms
City, Country · phone · email · linkedin.com/in/you or portfolio

SUMMARY
Two or three lines: who you are professionally, your strongest proof,
and what you do best.

SKILLS
Grouped by type: tools, methods, certifications, languages

EXPERIENCE
Job Title, Employer, City                              MM/YYYY – Present
• Action verb + what you did + scale or method + result
• ...

EDUCATION
Degree, Subject, Institution                           YYYY

OPTIONAL: Certifications · Projects · Volunteering · Languages

Put your name in larger text at the top, then one line of contact details: city and country (a full street address is no longer expected in the US or UK), a phone number with the country code if you’re applying abroad, a professional email address, and a LinkedIn profile or portfolio link if it’s up to date.

A headline under your name is optional but useful, especially when your current job title doesn’t match the job you want: “Data Analyst | SQL, Power BI, forecasting”. Keep it truthful. It describes what you do, not a title you’ve never held.

What to leave out depends on the country. In the US and UK, skip the photo, date of birth, marital status and nationality; if you’ll need a visa, one line about your work status is enough. In Germany and some other European countries, a photo and a few more personal details are still common with traditional employers, so check the local convention before you apply there.

The summary sits under your contact details and answers the reader’s first question: who is this, and are they relevant? Two or three lines are enough, built from three parts:

1. Who you are professionally: your role or field and your years of experience.
2. Your strongest proof: one result or specialism that matches the job.
3. What you bring next: the skills or the kind of work you’re targeting.

Compare two versions for the same person:

Before: “Hard-working, results-driven professional with excellent communication skills, looking for a challenging role in a dynamic company.”

After: “Customer success manager with six years in B2B software, managing 40 mid-market accounts with 96% gross retention. Strong at onboarding, renewals and turning customer feedback into product requests.”

The first could describe anyone. The second gives the reader three facts to check against the ad. Our resume summary examples show the same formula for twelve roles. If you have little experience, a line about the role you want and the skills you bring from study or projects does the same job.

Work experience is the part recruiters read most carefully, and where most resumes are weakest. For each job, give your title, the employer, the city and the dates (month and year), then three to six bullet points for recent roles and one to three for older ones. If the employer isn’t well known, add a few words of context, such as “(fintech, 200 employees)”.

The common mistake is listing duties: what the job description said you were responsible for. A recruiter can guess the duties from your title. What they can’t guess is how well you did them. Write each bullet as:

Action verb + what you did + how, or at what scale + the result.

What if you don’t have numbers?

Most people have more than they think. Look for volume (tickets, patients, orders, accounts), scale (team size, budget, number of users), speed (turnaround times, deadlines), quality (error rates, satisfaction scores, audit results) and before-and-after comparisons. An honest estimate is fine if you can explain it, such as “about a fifth” or “roughly 30 a week”. An invented number isn’t, because interviewers ask how you measured it.

Small rules that make bullets easier to read

• Start with a strong, specific verb and vary it: built, reduced, led, negotiated, launched, trained. Avoid “responsible for” and “helped with”.
• Use the present tense for your current job and the past tense for earlier ones.
• Keep each bullet to one or two lines. A three-line bullet is usually two achievements.
• Put the bullet that best matches the target job first in each role.

To see this applied to a whole document, our resume examples show complete resumes with bullet rewrites for dozens of roles, from software engineer to registered nurse.

The skills section is where a recruiter’s keyword search and a hiring manager’s skim both land. Fill it from the list you made in step 1: the hard skills, tools, methods and certifications your target ads ask for and that you can genuinely use. Group them so they’re easy to scan:

SKILLS
Analysis: SQL, Python (pandas), Excel (pivot tables, Power Query), A/B testing
Visualisation: Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio
Data tools: Snowflake, dbt, Google Analytics 4
Languages: English (native), Spanish (B2)

Eight to fifteen items is plenty for most people. Leave out skill bars and star ratings: they mean nothing to a reader and don’t survive parsing. Soft skills such as communication or leadership belong in your bullets, as evidence, rather than in this list. Our guide to skills to put on a resume covers how to choose them, with examples for ten fields.

Education goes below experience once you have a couple of years of work behind you; recent graduates can put it first. List the degree, subject, institution and year. Add your grade only if it’s strong and recent, and give the scale for readers abroad (“3.7/4.0 GPA”, “First-class honours”).

Certifications get their own short section when they’re relevant: name, issuer and year, for example “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (Amazon Web Services, 2025)”. A course you haven’t finished can go in as “in progress, due March 2027”.

Optional sections earn their place only when they support the target job:

• Projects, especially for students, career changers and technical roles: what you built, with which tools, and a link.
• Volunteering that shows relevant skills, such as treasurer of a charity or organiser of a meetup.
• Languages with a level, using the A1–C2 scale for European employers.
• Awards and publications if they’re recent and relevant.

Things you can drop: “References available on request” (it’s assumed), an objective that only says you want a job, hobbies that say nothing about you, and roles from more than about 15 years ago unless they’re directly relevant.

To cut, start with the oldest and least relevant roles and compress them to one line each. Then remove duties that anyone with your title would have done, and skills you’ve listed twice. Don’t shrink the font below 10.5 points or the margins to almost nothing to squeeze more in: a dense page is harder to read than a well-spaced second page.

A resume written for “any data analyst job” competes poorly against one that clearly answers this ad. Tailoring doesn’t mean starting again. Keep a master resume with everything in it, then spend ten to fifteen minutes per application on four changes:

1. Headline and summary: match the job title and the one or two requirements the ad stresses most.
2. Skills: move the skills the ad names to the front of their group, and drop the ones it doesn’t care about.
3. Top bullets: in your latest role, lead with the bullet that fits best, or swap in a stronger example from your master.
4. Wording: where you have the experience, use the ad’s term for it (“client onboarding” rather than “customer setup”).

The line not to cross is inventing anything: a skill you don’t have, a bigger number, a title you didn’t hold. It falls apart in the interview and can cost you an offer later. Our guide to tailoring your CV without lying walks through the method, and the free CV score checker compares your resume with a job ad and lists the keywords it can’t find.

1. Read it out loud, slowly. Typos in a resume read as carelessness, fairly or not. Reading the last line first helps you see words rather than meaning.
2. Check consistency: one date format, one bullet style, consistent tenses, and the same job titles and dates as your LinkedIn profile.
3. Run the plain-text test: copy everything from your PDF into a plain text editor. If the order scrambles or words run together, an applicant tracking system may read it the same way. The ATS resume checklist covers the other format checks.
4. Save it as a PDF unless the employer asks for Word, and name the file “Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf”.
5. Ask one person in your field to read it for 60 seconds and tell you which job they think you’re applying for. If they can’t say, your summary and top bullets need work.

Once you start applying, the same details go into long application forms again and again. The FindAJobAI Chrome extension fills those fields from your profile on Greenhouse, Lever, Workday and similar systems, and it never submits anything for you.

• One resume for every job. A generic document loses to a tailored one from a candidate with similar experience.
• Duties instead of results. “Responsible for reporting” tells the reader nothing your title didn’t.
• A design-heavy template. Columns, icons and graphics often break parsing and slow down the human reader too.
• Vague dates or unexplained gaps. One honest line about a career break beats a blank year the reader has to guess about.
• Claims you can’t back up. Every skill and number on the page is a possible interview question.