US Resume Format

Use this order unless you have a clear reason not to:

1. 1.Header — name, city and state, phone, email, LinkedIn. A full street address is unnecessary.
2. 2.Summary — two or three lines: your role, years of experience and the strongest thing you can prove.
3. 3.Experience — most recent first. Title, employer, city, month and year. Three to six bullets per recent role, fewer for older ones.
4. 4.Education — degree, school, year. GPA only if it is strong and recent.
5. 5.Skills — tools, languages and methods, in the vocabulary the posting uses.
6. 6.Optional — certifications, publications, selected projects, volunteering.

Length: one page under roughly five years of experience; two pages for most experienced professionals; three only for senior academic, medical or federal applications that ask for detail.

Bullets: start with a past-tense verb, say what you did and give the result in numbers — revenue, cost, time, volume, error rate. “Responsible for” is a duty; “cut onboarding time from 10 days to 4” is evidence.

Formatting: one column, standard headings (Experience, Education, Skills), a common font at 10–12 pt, 0.5–1 inch margins, no tables, text boxes or icons. Save as a text-based PDF named Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf.

Federal anti-discrimination law — Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — is the reason US resumes are stripped of personal data. The EEOC warns employers that asking for photographs, age, marital status or similar details can be used as evidence of discrimination, so most US employers do not want those details on file at all.

Leave off: photo, date of birth or age, marital status, children, religion, nationality, Social Security number, height and weight, a full home address, and “references available upon request”.

Be careful with: graduation years if you are worried about age signals (optional for experienced candidates), and hobbies (only when they show a skill relevant to the role).

This is the biggest adjustment for candidates from markets where a photo and personal details are normal. A US recruiter who receives a resume with a photo will usually assume the sender has not adapted to the US market — and some employers remove such resumes before review to protect themselves.

The format does not change when you apply from outside the US, but two things do. First, your experience has to be legible: convert currency, describe the client's industry and say what you personally owned. The Indian resume to US conversion guide walks through it field by field. Second, work authorization becomes the question every recruiter asks, so answer it once, in one line, with dates. Students should read the OPT and CPT resume guide and the cross-country international students guide; anyone who will need sponsorship should read the H-1B resume guide, which explains what the resume does and does not influence.

Every new US hire completes Form I-9, which verifies identity and authorization to work, so nothing you write on the resume replaces that check — but a clear line saves a screening call. Put it under your contact details or as a one-line section. Pick the one that is true:

• Authorized to work in the US; no sponsorship required — US citizens and green-card holders. (Many citizens leave this off entirely; it is most useful when your education or experience is from abroad.)
• F-1 OPT, EAD valid through June 2027; eligible for 24-month STEM OPT extension
• F-1 CPT authorized for internship employment, Summer 2026
• H-1B, currently employed; transfer required — a transfer for someone already counted under the cap is generally not subject to the lottery.
• H-4 EAD, valid through March 2028
• Will require H-1B sponsorship — honest, and better stated than discovered.

Never claim authorization you do not have. It surfaces at I-9 verification and ends the job. For the wording of the visa line across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Gulf in one table, see how to write visa status on a resume.

A resume for a US federal job, submitted through USAJOBS, follows different rules from a private-sector resume. The Office of Personnel Management and USAJOBS publish what a federal resume must contain, and agencies use it to decide whether you meet the minimum qualifications — so missing details can screen you out regardless of quality.

The usual differences: for each job, include start and end dates (month and year) and the hours you worked per week, because qualification is calculated from that time; describe duties in enough detail to show you meet the specialized-experience statement in the announcement; and mirror the announcement's wording where it truthfully describes your work. USAJOBS has also changed its resume length guidance in recent years, so check the current limit on the USAJOBS help pages before you build one.

Many agencies run applications through the USA Staffing system; the USA Staffing guide covers how it reads a resume. Keep a separate federal version — your private-sector one-pager will usually be too thin.

Most professional roles are found through LinkedIn, Indeed and employers' own career sites; Handshake dominates campus recruiting; USAJOBS is the only route into most federal jobs.

Whichever board you find the job on, large employers route the application into their own applicant tracking system. The most common are Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Lever and Oracle Taleo. They differ in detail — Workday asks you to re-enter work history into form fields, Greenhouse and Lever pass the document to a recruiter almost untouched — but all of them reward the same thing: a single-column, text-based file whose headings and dates parse cleanly.

Before sending, paste the posting into the JD tailoring tool and run the file through the free ATS resume checker.

If you are moving between these markets, keep a separate file for each rather than editing one document back and forth.