How to write a resume for a job, step by step, with examples

To write a resume for a job, put your contact details at the top, then education, experience, projects, and skills, in whichever order puts your most relevant work first. Write each entry as two to four bullets that start with a verb and end with a result, and match your wording to the job posting. That is the whole recipe. The rest of this guide is how to do each part well.

Most resume advice online was written for someone with a decade of experience deciding what to cut. If you are a student or new grad, your problem is the opposite. You are trying to make a small amount of real experience read as evidence. I wrote my first resume three times before it got a single response, and every fix below is something I learned the slow way.

Before you write a single line

Open three job postings for the kind of role you actually want. Not your dream company, just three real, current postings at the level you are applying for. Read them and highlight every skill, tool, and responsibility that appears in at least two of them.

That highlighted list is your target. A resume is not a biography, it is an argument that you match this kind of job. Everything you write next should support that argument, and anything that does not support it is a candidate for cutting.

The sections, in order

Use standard section names. Recruiters scan for them, and parsers use them to work out what each block of text is. Creative headings like My Journey or What I Bring cost you on both fronts.

The rule underneath the table: whatever is most relevant to the job goes highest. If your strongest evidence is a project, it can sit above a part time job that has nothing to do with the role.

Contact details: what to include

Keep this to one or two lines at the very top of the page, in the body of the document.

• Your name, larger than everything else.
• City and province or state. No street address. Employers use location for filtering, so include it.
• Phone and a professional email. firstname.lastname at a normal provider.
• LinkedIn and, if relevant, GitHub or a portfolio. Shorten the URLs to something clean.

Do not put contact details in the Word or Google Docs header area. Some parsers skip that region entirely, and then the system has a resume with no name or email attached.

Education

School, degree, major, and expected graduation month and year. Add GPA if it is 3.3 or higher, or if the posting asks for it. Add relevant coursework only if it matches the job, and list four or five courses at most.

Awards, scholarships, and dean's list fit here as a single line. If you are past your first job, shrink this section to one line per degree.

Experience and how to write bullets

Each role gets a title, company, location, and date range on one or two lines, followed by two to four bullets. The bullets are where resumes are won or lost.

A good bullet follows a simple pattern:

If you think you have no numbers, count what you touched: people served, hours saved, items processed, size of the team, how often, over how long. Twelve more rewrites, including the awkward cases, are in resume bullet points when you have no real experience yet.

Start every bullet with a different strong verb: built, led, cut, launched, automated, resolved, designed, trained. Avoid helped, assisted, worked on, and responsible for. They hide what you personally did.

Projects, if your experience is thin

For most students this is the strongest section on the page, and it is often written the weakest. Treat each project like a job: a name, a one line description of what it is, the tools, a date, and two bullets with results.

Class projects count. Hackathons count. A club website, a spreadsheet that ran your team's schedule, a volunteer event you organised. What matters is evidence that you can do the kind of work the posting describes.

Skills

A plain list, grouped if it helps: Languages, Tools, Frameworks, Certifications. Write each skill the way postings write it. JavaScript, not JS. Microsoft Excel, not spreadsheets.

Leave out skill bars and star ratings. Nobody knows what four stars in Python means, and parsers cannot read graphics. Leave out soft skills like teamwork and communication too. Show those in your bullets instead, where they are believable.

Formatting rules that actually matter

Most formatting advice is superstition. A few rules genuinely matter, because they decide whether the file can be read at all.

• One column. Two column layouts get read straight across by some parsers and scrambled.
• No tables for layout, no text boxes, no text inside images.
• A readable font at 10 to 12 points, with margins around half an inch to an inch.
• Consistent date format everywhere, such as May 2025 to Aug 2025.
• Save as a text based PDF unless the posting asks for Word.
• Name the file properly: Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf.

The full list of what breaks parsers, and what is harmless despite what you have read, is in the ATS friendly resume format guide. If you want the full quality check before you send it anywhere, run through the 15 point bulletproof resume checklist.

Turning it into a resume for a specific job

What you have now is a master resume. It is a good default, but a job resume is that master version pointed at one posting. You do not rewrite it every time. You change a few parts.

1. 1

   Pull the keywords from the posting

   Eight to twelve skills, tools, and phrases the job description repeats or lists as required. Use the exact wording.
2. 2

   Reorder the top third

   Move the experience or project most relevant to this job to the top of its section, so a six second scan finds it.
3. 3

   Swap vocabulary in your bullets

   Where you did the same work under a different name, use their name for it. Never add anything you have not actually done.
4. 4

   Adjust the skills list

   Lead with the skills this posting asks for and drop the ones it does not care about.

That takes about twenty minutes once you have done it a few times. The full process, and how much of a match to aim for, is in how to tailor your resume to a job description.

Write the master version once and write it carefully. Then spend your energy on tailoring and on volume, not on starting from a blank page every time you see a new posting.