US resume format: what American employers expect

• One page for most candidates; two for senior, academic-adjacent or highly technical roles.
• US Letter paper, reverse-chronological order.
• Name, phone, email, city and state, LinkedIn — no full street address.
• No photo, date of birth, marital status or other personal details.
• A short summary at the top instead of an "objective".
• Bullets that start with an action verb and end with a result.

The one-page rule is a strong default rather than a law. Students, recent graduates and people with under about ten years of experience should fit on one page — if you can’t, you are probably listing duties instead of results. Senior leaders, consultants, researchers and engineers with a long record of relevant projects can use two pages, as long as page two is as strong as page one.

1. Header — name, phone, email, city and state, and a LinkedIn or portfolio URL.
2. Summary — two to four lines: your level, specialty and the value you bring.
3. Experience — title, company, location, dates, and three to six bullets per recent role.
4. Skills — tools, technologies and methods, matched to the job description.
5. Education — degree, school, year. Recent graduates move this above experience.
6. Certifications, projects or awards — only if they strengthen the application.

The summary is two to four lines that tell the reader what you are, at what level, and why they should keep reading. Write it for the job you want, not the one you have.

Every phrase in that summary is something the rest of the résumé can prove. Avoid traits a reader can’t check, such as “detail-oriented” or “passionate”; show them in the bullets instead.

List tools, technologies, methods and certifications as short keywords, grouped if you have many. Leave out soft skills here; they read as filler in a list. A recruiter searching the applicant-tracking system for “Salesforce” or “GAAP” needs to find that exact word.

You don’t need a new résumé for every application, but you should adjust three things each time: the summary, the skills section, and the order of bullets in your most recent role. Read the posting, note the skills and terms that appear more than once, and make sure the ones you genuinely have appear in your résumé in the same words. If the posting asks for “stakeholder management” and your résumé says “worked with partners”, a keyword search may not connect the two.

With little work experience, put education first: degree, major, school, graduation month and year, and your GPA if it is 3.5 or higher (or the employer asks). Then use internships, projects, research and leadership roles as your experience. A class project with a real result, such as a model, an app or an analysis with a recommendation, is worth a full entry with bullets. One page is the rule here.

The Recent Graduate template is laid out education-first for exactly this.

Cover the last ten to fifteen years in detail. Earlier roles can go in a short “Earlier experience” line with titles and employers, without dates if you prefer, or be left out. Graduation years for older degrees are optional; leaving them off is common and keeps the focus on recent work.

If an employer might wonder whether you can work in the US, answer it in one line under your contact details. Online applications usually ask directly as well, so keep the two consistent.

US employment law prohibits discrimination on many grounds, so employers don’t want information that could expose them to a bias claim — and recruiters see it as a sign of an outdated résumé.

• Photo, date of birth, age, marital status, religion, nationality.
• Full street address — city and state are enough.
• An "objective" statement — replace it with a summary of what you offer.
• Salary history. Several states and cities restrict employers from asking for it anyway.
• "References available upon request".

Recruiters skim for evidence: scale, numbers and outcomes. Lead with a strong verb, say what you did, and finish with the result.

A gap of a few months needs no explanation. For longer gaps, add one factual line in your experience section, such as “Career break: family caregiving, 2023–2024”, and list any courses or freelance work you did. For jobs you held under a year because of a layoff or a contract ending, say so in a few words (“Role eliminated in company-wide layoff”), so the reader doesn’t assume the worst.

• A standard font at 10 to 12 point, with margins between 0.5 and 1 inch.
• Dates on the right or directly after the employer, in the same format throughout (“Sep 2023 – Present”).
• Bold for job titles or company names only.
• File name with your name and the word “resume”: “Jane-Doe-Resume.pdf”.

Many US postings make the cover letter optional, and many recruiters admit to skipping them. Send one when the posting asks, when you are changing careers or relocating, or when you have a personal connection to the company. Keep it to three or four short paragraphs. The US cover letter templates match American conventions.

• Two pages of duties when one page of results would do.
• An objective statement at the top.
• A photo, date of birth or full street address.
• The same résumé sent to every job, with none of the posting’s keywords.
• Skills listed that appear nowhere in your experience bullets.
• Typos. Read it aloud, or have someone else read it, before you send it.

Most US employers above a few dozen staff receive applications through an applicant-tracking system. The software parses your résumé into fields and recruiters search those fields, so your content has to be readable as text in a sensible order.

• Use conventional headings and a simple layout; complex columns and tables can scramble the reading order.
• Never put essential information in images, icons, headers or footers.
• Use the job description’s exact terms for skills you have — "project management", not only "PM".
• Submit a text-based PDF or DOCX, whichever the posting asks for.

Run your résumé through the free ATS resume checker to see what a parser can and can’t read, and paste a job description to check keyword overlap.