The Only Resume Template You’ll Ever Need

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Fads come and go, relevant experience and key accomplishments might evolve, but fundamentally, the basic resume format and structure remain the same.

That’s because the purpose of a resume has never changed: It’s a marketing document to clearly and concisely communicate to the recruiter your relevant experience and key accomplishments.

But people are forgetful. And instead of following this principle, they deliberately obscure their relevant experience and key accomplishments by “fancifying” their resume in attempt to distinguish themselves.

Invariably, this backfires as while they do manage to briefly capture the recruiter’s attention, they quickly lose it when the recruiter struggles to find important information.

Then, to pile on the punishment, they’ll find resume templates online that also confuse the recruiter with color, multiple columns, graphical skills sections, and other shenanigans.

And the whole time, they had the relevant experience and impactful achievements to get hired, but their resume failed to communicate this information to the recruiter.

It’s a vicious cycle.

That’s why in this article, I’m going to break the wheel just like Daenerys. I’m going to provide the only resume template that you’ll ever need.

No color.

No graphics.

No fanciness.

Just results.

I’m going to save you months of job searching, tens of thousands of dollars, and a whole lot of heartache by cutting through the noise. And after I provide the resume template and cover each section in detail, you’ll wish you never listened to the siren call of fancy resume templates ever again.

Breaking wheels since 2011

Onwards!

Here’s The Only Resume Template You’ll Ever Need

Below is the only resume template you’ll ever need, available to download in Word or PDF format; the Word version has comments that explain certain sections, which you should absolutely review. Just like for our cover letter template, you’ll insert your content where the {brackets} are. Feel free to adjust the resume template to fit your needs, but don’t deviate too much such that recruiters have trouble finding relevant information on your resume.

Access the templates here.

The best part of this resume template is that it’s timeless and works across all experience levels and job functions. No need for you to go through 300 different resume templates, each written for a specific job function, industry, and experience level; those resumes aren’t actually significantly different from each other as the websites that provide them do so mostly for SEO purposes (which benefits them, not you!).

And once you’ve written your resume using this resume template, it’s easy to update as you gain more experience and achieve more impact. Just insert more content beneath each section to form a master resume from which you can create custom resumes with content tailored to each job you’re applying for.

No more struggling to adjust multi-column resume formats to get your resume to fit on one page or configuring of shapes / charts / graphics.

Before I dive into explaining each section of the resume template, I need to call out that using our resume template is not a substitute for having the relevant experience and impact-filled accomplishments necessary to get the job.

Our resume template can only improve the clarity with which you communicate to the recruiter why your past work qualifies you for the job. If you don’t have this experience, then no resume template will help you.

As an extreme example, if you’re a college student applying to director-level positions, don’t think that using a resume template will magically get you a job of that caliber.

However, if you’re an “edge-case” in which you almost have the necessary relevant experience and key accomplishments for the job but are just shy of missing the posting’s requirements, then you should explore the concept of spinning your experience and achievements to make them more closely match said requirements.

Your resume is a marketing document, after all. We’re not in a court of law: In marketing, there’s no need to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. More on this in a later article.

Let’s cover why each section of the resume template matters and how to fill in your information.

How To Fill In Each Section Of The Resume Template And Why They Matter

While this resume template is designed to clarify your communication of your relevant experience and key accomplishments to the recruiter, I also want to take the time to educate you about the resume template itself.

It does you no good to fill in your information like a mindless zombie because you won’t understand what the recruiter is looking for.

Don’t be these guys

And if you don’t understand that, you’ll not only do a bad job of filling in the template but also flop on interviews since you won’t know what to say (in terms of what the recruiter needs to hear).

After all, you’re reading to increase your offer rate, not hurt it.

So read on to learn why each section in the resume template matters. It’ll be painless, I promise!

On This Resume Template’s Section Ordering

One of the major decisions you’ll have to make comes in the form of your resume section ordering. With the 3 core resume sections, “Professional Experience,” “Education,” and “Personal,” how do you decide which section to order first?

Unfortunately, most people barely put any thought into resume section ordering even though it’s one of the most important resume decisions you’ll make.

Think about it this way. When the recruiter starts scanning your resume, where will he or she start? At the top, of course. And whatever section the recruiter sees at the very top will be the first section he or she sees.

And you want that first section to contain as much of your relevant experience and key accomplishments as possible, which usually means putting your Professional Experience section first.

This is because there’s no guarantee that the recruiter will read your entire resume. Remember that for every job posting, the recruiter has to go through hundreds and hundreds of resumes, so your resume might only get a few seconds of the recruiter’s attention. It’s very likely that if the top 1/3 of your resume doesn’t interest the recruiter, they won’t give the other 2/3’s a chance.

So, what you don’t want to do is to put some arbitrary section first that doesn’t contain as much value as your Professional Experience section, like your Personal section.

Put your most valuable section first, then the next most valuable, then the next, etc.

Going back to our resume template, depending on your experience level, you should order your resume in 1 of 2 ways:

1. Current College Students: (1st) Education, (2nd) Professional And Leadership Experience, (3rd) Personal
2. Working Professionals: (1st) Professional Experience, (2nd) Education, (3rd) Personal

Note that for the first group, I emphasize college in the students category. That means that if you’re an MBA, masters, law, etc. student, you do not fall into the first category: You’re a working professional.

Notice that there are two key differences between the first and second methods:

1. First, current college students should put their Education section as their first section, before their Professional And Leadership Experience sections. Working professionals should put their Professional Experience sections as their first section.
2. Second, current college students should include both club leadership and internship / other work experience in their Professional And Leadership Experience. However, working professionals should remove such college leadership experience from their resume (or, if they have leadership in other capacities besides college, such as leading lectures or workshops, they should put this experience as a one-liner in the Personal section, which we’ll cover later).

For (1), the reason for this difference is because of how recruiters evaluate current college student and working professional candidates differently.

Pretend for a second that you’re a college student. As a college student, you might have internship and leadership experience through clubs, but you have no formal work experience with which to demonstrate your potential impact. So, how can a recruiter compare you against your peers? Well, there’s your internship and leadership experience, but those are more qualitative and, therefore, more difficult to use as measuring sticks.

The easiest way that recruiters compare college students against each other is through their GPA and (optionally) standardized test scores (like the SAT or ACT) depending on the industry. And where are those located? In the Education section.

So because recruiters will be looking for this specific information before looking at anything else, it behooves current college students to put their Education section first.

But for working professionals, they do have relevant experience and impactful achievements they’ve accomplished through their professional experience. Since they have the information that recruiters assume to be the gold standard in evaluating employee profitability, working professionals should put their Professional Experience sections first. Additionally, they should leave off their GPA and standardized test scores (with the exception of special honors like “salutatorian,” “valedictorian,” “summa cum laude,” etc.) since those are no longer relevant given their work experience.

For (2), since college students have no real way of demonstrating leadership, 1 of the 4 key resume soft skills, through their work experience (no sane employer is going to let an intern lead a project of reasonable size), they can only do so through their club leadership. As such, their Professional Experience section should become a Professional And Leadership Experience section in which they format their club leadership experience like an actual job position with their title, dates of position held, and impactful accomplishments.

Such club leadership experience should have enough oomph to be worth mentioning on a resume. Being a “member” of a club usually isn’t going to cut it unless you achieved something significant as a member.

But for working professionals, they’ve had plenty of time to demonstrate leadership through their work experience. As a working professional, you might have led projects or influenced leadership to invest in various initiatives. You likely have gotten promoted as a result of your guidance of new hires, helping out your coworkers, and generation of results. These are tangible examples of how your leadership has impacted the company and driven growth. This kind of leadership experience is the gold standard that recruiters use.

Consequently, working professionals can discard their club leadership experience from college and just have a Professional Experience section. If, as a working professional, you’ve led lectures or other special activities outside of work that are significant, then it could be worth calling these experiences out in a separate one-liner under your Personal section.

So, as you’ve learned, there are only 2 ways of ordering your resume sections. Either, as a college student, you put your Education section first and immediately follow it up with your Professional And Leadership Experience section, OR as a working professional, you put your Professional Experience section first and immediately follow it up with your Education section.

Easy, right?

At this point, if you’ve seen other resumes in the wild, you might wonder about other sections you’ve seen, like a summary, objectives, skills, relevant coursework, and potentially even others. Why aren’t those in this resume template?

As it turns out, those sections are largely extraneous with very few exceptions, which is why it isn’t worth including them. Let’s find out why and whether you might be one of those exceptions.

What? No Summary? No Objective?

Even though I’ve talked about resume summaries before (and even have provided guidance on how to write them), you’ll notice that there isn’t a resume summary in this resume template.

Why is that?

Going back to the 2 mutually exclusive categories of applicants above, current college students and working professionals, it’s because (1) college students have nothing to summarize and (2) more often than not, working professionals can’t write a good summary.

First, as a college student, you have no formal work experience, and, therefore, nothing to summarize. You might have internship or club leadership experience, but at best, that’s a rough substitute for actual work experience, which recruiters consider the gold standard.

Summaries are designed to orient the recruiter to someone with years and years of experience and plenty of impactful accomplishments, potentially across multiple fields. This orientation helps synthesize for the recruiter how all of this experience makes the candidate a good fit for the position.

It’s like the recruiter’s the captain of a pirate ship trying to steer their attention across the sea that is the candidate’s vast experience, and the candidate gives the recruiter a map to the treasure as a helpful guide.

Ahoy Mateys!

However, since you’re a college student with no formal experience, there’s no need for you to write this guide for the recruiter. The recruiter, who likely specializes in recruiting college students, knows the typical profile of a college student — internships, clubs, GPA/SAT. That’s it. Everything is standardized.

So any “guide” in the form of a resume summary you write for the recruiter is (1) going to be useless and (2) will take up precious resume real estate you could use for other content, like impactful club leadership.

As a working professional, however, you might actually have decades of experience that could use orienting in the form of a resume summary.

So why not add a resume summary then?

Because, more often than not, people don’t do a good job writing summaries. They’re unclear. Verbose. Write a whole bunch of fluff that doesn’t actually speak to their relevant experience and key accomplishments. And ultimately, they waste 3 (or more) lines writing a poor resume summary that actually turns the recruiter off.

So if you’re a working professional writing your own resume, I recommend just leaving the resume summary out as a safety mechanism to stop yourself from resume self-harm.

That being said, for our clients, since we’re the ones writing the resume, we will occasionally recommend our clients to include a resume summary by writing it for them. Having your resume summary written by a professional significantly reduces the risk of it backfiring on you.

So that’s my verdict for resume summaries: Don’t write one (yourself).

But what about resume objectives?

Absolutely not. No. Nada. Zilch.

They’re even worse than resume summaries since at least resume summaries attempt to help the recruiter find relevant information on your resume.

But resume objectives don’t do this. Resume objectives talk about what you want, which the recruiter doesn’t care about (at this stage of the job funnel). The recruiter only cares about what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

Forcing the recruiter to read several lines about your hopes and dreams is not going to make him or her happy.

So it’s a complete and total waste of space to write a resume objective, regardless of your experience level.

Instead, focus your efforts on fleshing out your work experience, education, and personal sections, which the recruiter does actually care about.

The resume summary and resume objective are the two most common items I see on resumes that usually shouldn’t be there. But what about skills, relevant coursework, and other sections? Should you include those?

Spoiler: You shouldn’t, with few exceptions.

What About Skills, Relevant Coursework, and Other Sections?

I just recently reviewed a client’s resume in which even though she was a graduate student with no real work experience, her resume skills and relevant coursework sections combined took up half a page.

Imagine devoting half a page on your resume (that’s likely supposed to only be a page long) to content that provides absolutely no value to the recruiter.

Feels cringy, doesn’t it?

If it doesn’t, it should.

In general, you shouldn’t have any other sections besides your Education, Professional (And Leadership) Experience, and Personal sections. Each of the 3 sections serve a distinct, important purpose on your resume and provide just enough information to clearly and concisely communicate your value to recruiters without going overboard.

That delicate balance between value and clarity is significantly disrupted when you start to add in other sections. These other sections, such as skills and relevant coursework, add close to 0 incremental value on your resume but take up just as much space as the other 3 core resume sections.

In other words, the other resume sections provide a poor return-on-investment for the space they consume.

Let’s tackle each of these other sections one-by-one.

First, while I do support the distinct mentioning of skills in a separate one-liner underneath the Personal section if and only if those skills are explicitly stated as required in the job posting and you don’t mention these skills in your Professional Experience section, I do not advise clients to create a separate resume skills section.

Such a section consumes a considerable amount of space and provides very little value to the recruiter.

Consider the following. Suppose I put down the following 3 skills in a distinct resume skills section: SQL, Excel, Tableau.

What does this tell the recruiter?

You guessed it — absolutely nothing.

All this “resume skills section” does is state 3 words. It doesn’t provide any context as to:

1. How skilled am I at each of these skills?
2. What did I accomplish with these skills?
3. Am I good enough at these skills for the job?

Questions that are the only ones that fundamentally matter to the recruiter. The recruiter doesn’t care that you “know SQL.” What the recruiter cares about is whether you can use SQL to make an impact and be profitable.

You demonstrate this through integrating your resume skills into your Professional Experience section. By doing so, you provide answers to those 3 questions and save precious resume real estate.

Talk about killing 2 birds with 1 stone, right?

Now, the exception here is if the job posting says, “Advanced {highly specialized skill} knowledge is required for the position,” and you’re concerned that the resume skills you integrate into your Professional Experience section will get lost in the shuffle (or you don’t have any direct, relevant experience with those skills). In that case, you may want to consider explicitly calling out this skill in a skills one-liner down in your Personal section provided you have the experience either at work or outside of work.

Even then, it still makes more sense to try the best you can to show the recruiter you can do {highly specialized skill} through your Professional Experience section vs. tell the recruiter via a skills one-liner since anyone can say they have the skill. In either case, you should absolutely not be creating a separate resume skills section.

Even worse than a resume skills section is a relevant coursework section. This one is for college students / anyone currently getting a degree.

Let me ask you a question — how valuable do you think what you learned in school is in the real world?

Very valuable? Somewhat valuable? At least a little?

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the answer is somewhere between absolutely no value and probably negative value given how the theoretical shenanigans you learn in school create bad habits.

So when you create a resume relevant coursework section and put “Macroeconomics” there, what is the recruiter supposed to take away from that? They have no idea…

1. …what curriculum you’re learning
2. …the quality of the curriculum
3. …how the professor is grading the course (i.e., how should they benchmark your course performance?)
4. …whether the information you learned is even relevant to the job
5. …did you actually learn anything useful or did you just goof around
6. Etc.

Similar to the skills section, it’s an issue of a lack of context, except in this case it’s even worse because in all likelihood, you learned nothing useful in those courses, whereas at least for resume skills, the skill itself might be directly relevant to the job.

So, what’s the takeaway from all of this?

Don’t include a resume skills or relevant coursework section. In fact, don’t include any other sections other than the 3 core ones already in the resume template.

Now that we’ve established what sections not to include on a resume and why, let’s dive into what sections you should include and why they matter.

The Education Section

Why It Matters: To meet the mandatory educational requirements of the job, degree-wise and GPA/standardized test score-wise, and to call out any special academic honors.

Out of all the 3 core resume sections, the Education section is the easiest to understand and fill out. Broadly, the recruiter needs to know that you have the GPA, scores, and degree(s) necessary to get the job.

Since the recruiter needs to go through hundreds of resume for each position, these items are an easy filtering mechanism to weed out resumes before the recruiter has to do a formal deep-dive into the Professional Experience section. It’s easy to set a minimum filter within the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for GPA, SAT / ACT scores, or the presence / lack of an undergraduate degree. Heck, even for smaller companies that can’t afford ATS software, the recruiter can just visually scan for these items.

So what you need to do is explicitly call out these items in your Education section. At the minimum, your Education section should have:

Current College Students:

1. College name
2. City, state / country of the college
3. Degree type (Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, etc.)
4. Majo
5. GPA
6. Expected graduation month and year

Optional:

1. Academic honors (scholarships, special distinctions, etc.)
2. Minor
3. Standardized test scores (SAT, ACT, etc.)

Working Professionals:

1. College name
2. City, state / country of the college
3. Degree type (Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, etc.)
4. Major
5. Graduation month and year

Optional:

1. Minor
2. Academic honors (scholarships, special distinctions, etc.)

These items are self-explanatory, and you can check our resume template in the Education section to see how you might fill in the information. Note that the working professional no longer is required to put down his or her GPA or standardized test scores since the recruiter is now evaluating him or her on their actual work experience.

Generally, you should seek to minimize the size of the Education section. This resume section is considered “table-stakes” in which the recruiter is simply “checking-the-box” as to whether you meet the mandatory minimum educational requirements.

In other words, this section is not going to get you hired. It’ll only help you not get rejected.

Therefore, you want to conserve space here so that you have more resume real estate to talk about your relevant experience and key accomplishments, items that the recruiter actually cares about.

With your Education section written, it’s time to move on to the section that matters the most: The Professional Experience section.

The Professional Experience Section

Why It Matters: To demonstrate your value to the recruiter by clearly and concisely communicating your relevant experience and key accomplishments.

By far, your Professional Experience section should be the largest and most well-thought section on your resume.

Ultimately, this is the section that will determine whether you get the interview.

For an employer to hire you, you must be profitable — you cannot cost more than the value you generate. The employer roughly knows how much it’ll cost to hire you (subject to negotiations), but what he or she doesn’t know is how much value you’ll generate.

That’s where your resume, cover letter, and interviews will come in. The recruiter and hiring committee will use these tools to gather data about this value, and, essentially, whether you’ll be a profitable hire.

Now, rest assured, no one is actively computing the exact dollar value they think you’re worth. But they are absolutely evaluating your value against the cost it would take to hire you, if not explicitly then implicitly. This value they’re benchmarking you against will not only determine whether they even want to hire you but also any compensation negotiations if you get the offer, which is arguably equally as important.

Your goal is to maximize their perception of your value through each and every component of the job funnel process, from your resume to your cover letter and, finally, to your interviews.

And, for your resume, it is the Professional Experience section that partially determines your overall value.

Now that you understand just how important the Professional Experience section is, let’s dive into some best practices when writing out this section.

Remember, Remember To Use The Impact-based Resume Bullet Formula

The most important thing to remember when writing your Professional Experience section is to highlight and quantify the impact you’ve generated.

One of the worst mistakes clients make is only describing the relevant experience they’ve had. Of course, you need relevant experience to get the job. But if you cannot demonstrate that you can impact the business, then the recruiter will perceive you to be an unprofitable hire, which translates to “don’t interview.”

The other common mistake is that even for the clients who do highlight their impact, they don’t quantify their impact. If you don’t quantify the impact you produced, then to the recruiter, it’s the equivalent of not displaying any impact at all.

Think about it this way.

Suppose that I write the following impact-focused resume bullet:

• Increased annual revenues by building new distribution channels in China, Japan, and Korea

I claim I increased revenues. OK, but by how much? Was it 1%? 5%? 10%? $1K? $100K? $1M?

Without knowing the magnitude of the impact, the recruiter has no way of assessing the value you would bring to his or her firm.

Instead, suppose I rewrite that same impact-focused resume bullet like this:

• Increased annual revenues by $1M through building new distribution channels in China, Japan, and Korea

There we go. Now the recruiter has a way to contextualize the value you could generate. Assume you’re being hired for a position with $250K annual base salary and a potential 25% performance bonus. Let’s say you maximize the bonus and are paid $250K + $62.5K = $312.5K. Then tack on another 50% as a rough estimation of your benefits cost for a total of $312.5K * 1.5 = ~$470K. Already, you’re profitable if you can just replicate that impact once per year because you earned the company $1M but only cost $470K, netting $530K.

Of course, this is a very simplified example with lots of assumptions, but these are the sorts of implicit calculations that are going on in the back of the recruiter’s and hiring committee’s minds. So if you don’t put a number to your impact, they’ll just assume $0, and you won’t be profitable in their minds.

In some ways, I understand why our clients don’t want to quantify their impact.

Sometimes it’s hard to get figures for the impact you caused.

Sometimes, figures are sensitive information.

Sometimes, it was a team effort, so it’s difficult to figure out what part of the impact was truly from you.

And sometimes, clients are afraid of taking credit of impact they feel they didn’t actually create and being expected to replicate such impact in future jobs.

There are lots of reasons.

But, it doesn’t matter: You need numbers.

Because at the end of the day, the recruiter and hiring committee need to know if you’ll make them money. So, give them the juicy details.

Regarding the mechanics of writing impact-focused resume bullets, use this formula:

• Accomplished [x] by doing [y] which resulted in [z]

This formula is golden because it forces you to both quantify your impact and attach exactly what you did to generate that impact — a complete package.

It’s a natural lead-in to interview questions, and presumably, you’d have interview stories already prepared for each of your impact-focused bullet points.

A collection of these impact-focused resume bullets will significantly strengthen the competitiveness of your application. Now, the recruiter can go through your resume and (roughly) determine your value.

With your impact-focused resume bullets written, the next step is to determine your job position ordering.

Should I Use Chronological Or Relevancy-based Job Ordering?

There are 2 main schools of thought when it comes to ordering your job titles:

1. Chronological, with your most recent position at the top of your Professional Experience section
2. By relevancy, with the most valuable, relevant, and impactful position at the top of your Professional Experience section

There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong approach. How you determine which approach to use will depend on:

1. How much work experience you have overall
2. How much relevant work experience you have for the job posting
3. Whether the job posting emphasizes a generalist or specialist skillset

First, how much work experience you have overall will broadly determine whether it’s even worth ordering by relevancy.

For instance, suppose that you only have 3 years of experience spread over 2 jobs. Is it even worth ordering by relevancy? All that means is swapping your jobs back and forth on your resume.

The more experience you accumulate, the more valuable it becomes to sort your experience by relevancy.

Second, how much relevant work experience you have (relative to the job posting) will determine whether you have any relevant job titles to sort to the top anyways. If you don’t have any relevant experience relative to the job posting, then you should default to chronological ordering.

Lastly, whether the job posting emphasizes a generalist or specialist skillset will determine the value of sorting by relevancy. In certain fields, having a generalist skillset is more valued, in which case sorting by relevancy makes no sense since every job is relevant based on a generalist point-of-view. On the other hand, for a highly specialized role that requires extremely relevant experience, sorting by relevancy makes absolute sense.

Ultimately, you should sort by time or relevancy based on the factors above — there isn’t any one size fits all solution.

My preference is to sort by relevancy because, at the end of the day, your resume is a marketing document designed to sell the recruiter on the value you generate, and said value is more valuable if it’s done through relevant experience.

But you should decide for yourself based on your work history and the jobs you’re applying to.

Once you’ve chosen the way you want to sort your job titles, the next step is to choose specifically which jobs you want to include in your Professional Experience section.

Do I Need To Add Every Job I’ve Ever Had Into My Professional Experience Section?

You do not need to include every job you’ve ever had on your resume.

In fact, you should try your best to only include the job titles that have your most relevant experience and impactful achievements.

Now, that being said, you’re going to be somewhat restricted in doing so by your choice of chronological-based or relevancy-based ordering of your job titles.

For instance, if you go with chronological-based ordering, then you generally cannot omit jobs between the first and last jobs you put in the Professional Experience section.

If you do so, you’ll end up with a large time gap in your Professional Experience section, which will raise questions (unless the job you elected to omit only has a duration of a few months).

But you could omit jobs before the oldest job on your resume earlier in your career.

With relevancy-based ordering, you have much more flexibility with what jobs you leave on or off your resume since time gaps can be explained away by simply stating that the job wasn’t as relevant to the position you’re applying to.

Overall, never feel pressure to include everything on your resume. Frequently, including everything leads to poor resume readability and your relevant experience getting lost in the noise. That being said, you should be aware of how your job title ordering decision affects the flexibility with which you can pick and choose which job titles to include on your resume.

At this point, we’ve written your impact-based resume bullets, decided on a job ordering style, and chosen which jobs to include. Finally, you need to decide how to organize the resume bullets within each of your job positions.

Should I Use Project-based Organization Or Impact-based Organization For My Resume Bullets?

You have two options: (1) Project-based organization or (2) impact-based organization.

If you haven’t had a peak at the resume template yet, project-based organization looks like this (imagine the project lines are the first-level indentation since Medium doesn’t allow multi-level bullet formatting):

$300M Media Target Due Diligence for a Private Equity Client

• Increased annual revenues by $25M from implementing a China distribution channel turnaround plan
• Influenced management team to invest $50M into a Chinese marketing strategy to penetrate greenfield northern markets

GTM Strategy for $1B Consumer Packaged Goods Client

• Increased RoAS by 5 percentage points after optimizing marketing spend allocation across Asia Pacific region
• Accelerated GTM timelines by 30% from consolidating individual European country campaigns into a single EU overarching strategy

For each job position, you organize your resume bullets around specific projects you completed. This strategy works best in fields where your work is project-based, such as investment banking, private equity, consulting, internal strategy, etc. It’s a great way to categorize your relevant experience and key achievements into neat, project-based buckets that form a foundation for your interview stories.

A drawback is that the additional line for the project and the second-level bullet indentation consume more resume space, but it’s a small price to pay to improve the readability and organization of your resume.

The other alternative, impact-based organization, is the traditional approach.

For each job position, you prioritize resume bullets by impact (ranked by magnitude) under a single-level bullet indentation scheme. It’d look like this:

• Increased MRR by $5M through establishing 50 new Chinese retail and wholesale partners
• Drove 5 percentage points of Brazilian market share gains through a comprehensive radio, mail, and digital marketing campaign
• Reduced unit costs by 35% from consolidating purchase contracts with the firm’s top 3 suppliers
• Decreased overall days inventory outstanding by 5 days after implementing just-in-time inventory practices within Asia

Note that the higher impact bullets (generally revenue-related) are ranked first, whereas lower impact bullets (generally cost-related) are ranked last.

This approach works best if you don’t have a job that’s project-related, which is most fields. The benefits of this approach are that your resume looks cleaner with reduced text, and you save space from not having to consume a line for every project.

Writing your Professional Experience section is a daunting task, but by addressing these 4 points, I hope that I’ve made clear the pros and cons of the decisions you’ll have to make when choosing its structure.

Once you’ve finished, you can relax in the home stretch of writing your Personal section.

The “Miscellaneous” (Personal) Section

Why It Matters: To spark conversation with the recruiter via your interests one-liner and catch any other relevant, impactful experience on your resume.

Last but not least, we’ll write your Personal section.

While not as important as your Professional Experience or Education sections, the Personal section is your last chance to inform the recruiter of anything notable.

It’s a catch-all, miscellaneous section designed to showcase your “extracurricular” activities outside of work and inject just a touch of creativity into your resume.

Each subsection of your Personal section is composed of fully optional one-liners that could include:

1. Projects
2. Skills
3. Languages
4. Leadership
5. Interests

Let’s talk through each one.

Projects

Why It Matters: To highlight any relevant experience or key accomplishments you gained through projects you completed outside of work.

Although somewhat vague, the Projects section is your chance to show off the results of anything you built or any “side hustles” you have outside of work.

The vagueness of this section is intentional — you have broad flexibility with how you describe your projects here.

For example, if you’re a software engineer, you could write about the mobile app you designed on the side that gained 1K monthly active users.

Your Projects section might look like this:

• Projects: Achieved 1K MAU by building a day trip optimizer app based on weather patterns using React Native, Mongo DB, and the OpenWeatherMap API

Or let’s say you’re a consultant that started a resume reviewing consultancy on the side. Your Projects section might look like:

• Projects: Achieved $10K MRR by building a resume review consultancy that services 50 clients per month

Whichever way you describe your projects, what’s important is that you highlight your relevant experience and key accomplishments. But, one key difference is that your side project experience doesn’t have to be directly related to the experience required from the job posting.

You could imagine that the consultant in the example above would apply to corporate strategy and operations roles, and resume reviewing is only tangentially related to that (need a good resume to get the job, maybe some experience with sales and marketing or operations through running the business, etc.).

However, the ironclad consistency that should remain between your Projects section and your Professional Experience section is that both should absolutely highlight your impact. Note that the Project one-liners are written using the same “Accomplished [x] which resulted in [y] by doing [z]” format that you impact-based Professional Experience resume bullets use.

Now, not everyone has high-impact projects they do outside of work, and that’s OK. No need to spend your entire life optimizing for your career. In that case, simply omit the Projects one-liner.

If you do have projects, but they don’t have high-impact, then one option is to simply leave them off your resume. You should always prioritize your relevant experience and key accomplishments from your Professional Experience section first since they describe your value to future employers. Projects are a “nice-to-have” addition.

One exception to this rule of prioritizing Professional Experience content first is if the relevant experience in your Professional Experience section is not strong. This could be the case if you are doing a career switch into a field unrelated to your current field. During this process, you might have gained direct, relevant experience by doing side projects outside of work. If you have projects that are more directly related to the position vs. your actual work experience, then you should consider setting aside some space for such projects.

As always, use your best judgement when deciding which (if any) projects to include on your resume. Remember that the employer cares about your value, so make sure your projects can attest to that value in some way.

It’s one thing to write about things you actually did with your Projects section, but what about highlighting the skills you used to build them? Let’s dive into this controversial topic next.

Skills

Why It Matters: To explicitly state to the recruiter any specialized skills you have required by the job posting that you do not demonstrate through your Professional Experience section.

Oh boy, the notorious Skills section.

I talked about it above already, but it’s worth calling it out here again because of its importance: I have a strong negative bias towards Skills sections in general, particularly standalone Skills sections, because they don’t actually demonstrate your value in any capacity. Effectively, what you’re doing is telling the recruiter you have the skill, not showing the recruiter you can create value with said skills, which is what actually matters.

In a traditional resume skills section, you haphazardly list out a random laundry list of skills that you think you have and hope the recruiter takes your word for it, not dissimilar to a 3rd rate clown who pretends to know everything that someone’s parents hired for their kid’s 5th birthday party.

Don’t be this guy

I say “think you have” because for those candidates who list out 10–15+ skills in said resume skills sections, it’s highly unlikely that they actually know all those skills in great detail.

Think about it logically — it’s impossible for anyone to be good at 15 different things (unless that person is a genius, but if that’s the case, then it seems like everyone is a genius based on the frequency with which I see these resume skills sections).

Realistically, you’re good at 3 or 4 different things and have passing knowledge in a few more areas. But to be an expert in 15 different skills? Not even the world’s most famous scientists are that skilled.

So the BS-factor is pretty high for resume skills sections, especially since the recruiter can’t really tell your skill level or the results you produced using any of the skills.

The takeaway is that, with one exception, you should not have a standalone skills section on your resume. It’s a waste of space, trips the recruiter’s BS alarm, and doesn’t provide any useful information to the recruiter.

Now, I mention “with one exception,” so what is that exception?

The only exception in which you should be explicitly stating your skills on your resume is through a one-liner in your Personal section, not as a separate resume skills section, if and only if the job explicitly requires said skills and you don’t demonstrate such skills through your Professional Experience section.

There should be close to zero occurrences of this exception occurring because if said skills are so important to the position, then you should be fully capable of generating results with such skills, in which case you absolutely should be writing about them in your Professional Experience section, not a skills section.

One possible instance of this exception could be for an esoteric government position that explicitly requires a highly specialized set of skills that you haven’t had the opportunity to use in any of your current or previous positions but have learned in some capacity outside of work.

So to call out such “extracurricular” experience, you may have to list the skills in a one-liner within your Personal section.

Always strive to prioritize showcasing the results that you’ve achieved with your skills.

With that said, you might wonder how languages fit into all of this…

Languages

Why It Matters: To inform the recruiter of business-level fluency in any languages that may be useful to the company.

A subset within skills, languages are a special case in which it usually is worth calling them out in a one-liner within your Personal section if and only if you have business-level fluency for that particular language.

For reference, I view one’s degree of fluency through the lens of 5 levels (worst to best):

1. None
2. Basic
3. Conversational
4. Advanced
5. Fluent / business-level proficiency

Generally, employers can only leverage your language speaking abilities if they’re at the highest level, “fluent / business-level proficiency,” so it’s not worth putting any languages that you have “advanced” or worse fluency.

This is because you’d have to “do business” in that language, which means reading contracts, speaking with other businesspeople who are fluent in that tongue, observing business customs practiced by businesspeople who speak that language, etc., all of which requires a very advanced understanding of said language.

But if you do have business-level proficiency, you should absolutely call it out separately because your impact-based resume bullets will typically not attribute credit to you because you speak a foreign language. Consequently, if you don’t call your languages out separately, the recruiter isn’t going to know that you can speak other languages.

For example, you probably wouldn’t write an impact-focused resume bullet like so:

• Increased annual revenues by 15% by speaking German at a business-level proficiency

Very weird, right?

Instead, include languages in which you have business-level proficiency on your resume in this format:

• Languages: German (business-level fluency), Arabic (business-level fluency)

You should call out specifically that you have business-level fluency, else the recruiter will assume otherwise.

Of course, if you don’t have any languages with business-level proficiency, omit this one-liner.

Once you have your languages one-liner written, next is your Leadership one-liner.

Leadership

Why It Matters: To showcase any leadership activities outside of work, such as lectures, workshops, or other events you’ve led.

Recall that leadership is 1 of the 4 key resume soft skills you need to demonstrate on your resume.

Where you demonstrate this will depend on whether you’re a current college student or a working professional (includes graduate students).

If you’re a current college student, you’ve probably had plenty of opportunities to practice leadership through clubs and other on-campus activities. As mentioned earlier, such experiences go in your Professional And Leadership Experience section. Do not include a Leadership one-liner in your Personal section.

However, as a working professional, you should deemphasize your Education section and prioritize your Professional Experience section.

While part of that involves removing all the college club leadership experience you had from your resume, you should also consolidate any leadership experiences you have post-college and outside of work into a one-liner within your Personal section.

Such experiences don’t have to be directly relevant to your field, but you should quantify any impact you had.

For instance, consider the following example:

• Leadership: Led “10 Things I Learned as a PM” talk given to 10K+ attendees at the 2021 SF Product Expo

Note how the candidate quantifies “10K+ attendees” to provide context for the size of her lecture.

Just like your Projects one-liner, it’s important to quantify your impact in your Leadership one-liner as well (and generally, throughout your resume) as it gives visibility into your value for the recruiter.

Feel free to include multiple instances of leadership in this one-liner, but be cautious of consuming too much space such that it begins to overshadow your Professional Experience section.

Now, we finally get to the fun part — your Interests one-liner.

Interests

Why It Matters: To spark conversation with the recruiter and add just a touch of creativity to your resume.

While you should always highlight your relevant experience and key accomplishments for every other section of your resume, your Interest one-liner is the one place in your resume where you can relax (but not too much).

Namely, the hobbies that you write down don’t have to be connected with demonstrating your value, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to follow best practices, namely:

1. Do not be weird.
2. Do not go overboard.
3. Do not be generic.

For the first point on being weird, do not write anything politically sensitive, offensive, or not safe for work. You should draw on common sense here. If a friend reviews your resume and balks at your interests, you have a problem.

For the second point on going overboard, do not write more than one line for your interests. Realistically, like skills, you can only be truly interested in so many things. If you’re finding yourself listing off more than 4 interests, pick 4 of the ones that are the most interesting and that you can talk about the most. Never allow your interests to overshadow your Professional Experience section.

For the last point on being generic, do not write about standard hobbies that everyone has. For instance, one anonymous client wrote:

• Interests: Biking, hiking, gaming, swimming

Frankly, these are far too generic and aren’t interesting. I’m not saying these are bad hobbies to have. In fact, I love gaming. But the problem is that the goal of your interests section is not to write about what you like. It’s about forming a connection with the recruiter through your resume with something interesting. Your resume is a marketing document, after all, not a free-form autobiography.

So, a better approach would be to turn those interests into something more specific, like:

• Interests: Mountain biking through the Cliffs of Moher; CoD e-sports tournaments

Now that’s way more interesting — guarantee you at least a few interviewers will bring this up.

Some may protest and say they truly don’t have anything specific and interesting like the example I gave. I argue that, in fact, yes you do. You’re an interesting person. You just don’t know it. There’s at least one activity you do with some degree of frequency that the average person doesn’t know about.

It’s up to you to find what that is.

Final Thoughts On Our Resume Template

And with that, we’ve covered every part of our resume template.

Each of the 3 core resume sections serves a distinct purpose, and it’s important that you take the time to thoughtfully write out each section with your relevant experience and impactful achievements.

Your Education section should be bare bones and communicate just enough information such that the recruiter knows you pass the minimum educational requirements of the job. This section should go first only if you’re a current college student.

Next, your Professional Experience section should be the heftiest portion of your resume. It should contain the critical information that will get your hired, which is your relevant experience and impactful achievements. Based on your own unique situation, you’ll decide on the ordering of your job titles, each title’s resume bullets, and which jobs to keep on your resume. If you’re a college student, include club leadership experience here and retitle the section to “Professional And Leadership Experience.”

Lastly, your Personal section should contain a mix of Projects, Skills, Languages, Leadership, and Interests one-liners depending on the experience you have and the jobs you’re applying for. With few exceptions, it’s important to prioritize the inclusion of extracurricular activities that are related to the job and are impactful. Never let this section outshine your Professional Experience section.

Besides these 3 sections, don’t include any other sections on your resume as they’re a poor return on investment for the space consumed. Be concise over comprehensive.

I know you have what it takes to get the job — it’s just a matter of effective communication through your resume. With this resume template, you’re a step closer to landing those interviews and offers.

Good luck!

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