How to Get Your Resume Layout Right [The Complete Guide]

Table of Contents

1. Picking the Right Format Reverse-chronological Functional and Combo
2. Basic Formatting
3. The One-Pager Resume
4. Core Resume Sections
5. Contact Information
6. Summary or Objective
7. Work Experience
8. Education
9. Skills
10. Bonus Sections

It’s important to get your resume layout right.

Imagine spending hours and hours perfecting your resume. Filling in all your experiences, following all the resume best-practices, and perfecting the content to the smallest detail is exhausting.

All of that will be pointless if you don't nail your resume layout. After all, what’s important at the end of the day is how readable your resume is.

If the recruiter has to spend half an hour trying to make sense of it, they won’t even bother! And there goes all your hard work down the drain.

So before you even start working on your resume, you should make sure that your layout is top-notch: Have a look at these resume templates for inspiration. Then, read on to discover the best tips on resume layout.

Before digging into the different sections of the resume, you have to decide which format you’re going to follow.

There are 3 types of resume formats - reverse-chronological, functional & combo. In about 90% of the cases though, you’ll end up using the first.

• Reverse-chronological - Your typical resume format. You list your work experience in reverse chronology, starting from your latest job and ending with your first.

Functional - Rather than talking about your work experience, a functional resume is focused on your skills. You divide your experience and skills in “themes” and mention the relevant accomplishments with each. Here's an example:

In this example, the emphasis is placed on the SKILLS section of the resume, showing what the candidate can directly contribute to the position. The work experience comes secondary. Notice that there is an accomplishment added to each skills section.

• Combo - This is a mix of the other two formats. That means that you’ll mention both your work experience in reverse-chronology, as well as different skills, accomplishments, qualifications, etc.

Looking at the highlighted areas, you will see that this resume includes both detailed experience information and skills divided into sections + accomplishments.

Chances are, regardless of your industry or experience level, that you'd go for the reverse-chronological resume - it’s the most common of the 3, and it’s every recruiter’s favorite.

Basic readability for your resume is essential - if you use Comic Sans as a font, for example, you’ll have the recruiter laughing all the way to the trash bin.

Some general guidelines on formatting are:

• Use an established font - Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Helvetica
• Stay consistent - use one, maximum of 2 fonts (if you want your headers to stand out)
• Use bold & italics to point attention to specific sections or points
• If you’re using a Word resume, set your margins to one inch (or just use a resume builder, those have it preset)

“So how long should my resume be, anyway?”

You’ve probably pondered the question before - and maybe still are. The answer differs based on the length of your career.

If in some weird universe, the recruiter is happy to read all 200 pages of your career-biography, then you could go for as many pages as you want! That, however, is not the case.

On average, the recruiter spends 6 seconds looking at each resume - and you’ve got to make that time count. Are 6 seconds enough to list your entire life story? Definitely not.

As a simple rule, keep your resume down to one page. Have a look at these resume templates for a real-life example.

If you’ve got years and years of experience under your belt, then you might even go for 2, but in most cases, that’s not recommended.

If you’re a seasoned professional with 20 years of experience, you might be tempted to list every single one of your accomplishments. Don’t. Chances are, the job you’re applying for doesn’t involve using every single one of your skills.

Focus only on your relevant experience. Take a look at the following example:

Regardless of the field you’re in, you’re going to need to include the same sections in your resume.

Here are the most important sections your resume should feature.

The contact information section is the first thing you put on your resume, so it should go right on top. It’s extremely important to get it right. Even if your resume is the holy grail of all resumes, you’re still not getting a call-back if you typed in your phone number wrong.

The first 3 are self-explanatory. The location, though, is also very important - the recruiter needs to know that you’re actually based in the area and aren’t just applying for random jobs from the other end of the world.

Now, let’s pull all that into an example…

Keep in mind, though, that you should be extra careful with the contact information section. If there’s a typo in your email or you forget to mention your area code, you lose your chances with all the companies you’re applying for!

Under the contact information section, you can add either a resume summary or an objective.

The summary is an “introduction” to your resume, briefly summarizing your work experience.

The objective, on the other hand, is your sales pitch - it should explain why you want to work for that company.

Both of these should be around 4 to 5 sentences and located right under your contact information.

Unless you’re a recent graduate with no work experience, you probably want to go for the resume summary.

In most cases, your resume summary should mention:

• Years of Experience
• Industry-related Experience
• Achievements
• Relevant Education

Let's look at this example:

Here, you list your work experience, starting from your latest job and ending with your first. The work experience will be the core of your resume layout, since it's the most important section.

The location of your work experience in your resume is interchangeable with education - both go under your contact information and summary/objective.

In most cases, you’d want to put your work experience first, since that’s what’s going to get you the job. If, however, you’re a student with not much experience, you can put education on top instead.

Now, let’s turn that into an example…

As we’ve mentioned before, your education comes before or after your work experience section. Listing education is pretty standard - there’s not that much you can really invent here.

Check out this eample:

Mentioning your skills on a resume is essential - how else is the recruiter supposed to know that you're a Javascript wizard, for example?

This section’s pretty simple, all you have to do is list your soft & hard skills & mention your expertise along with them.

Never lie about your experience with certain skills, though. The recruiter will find out eventually, and you’ll both end up wasting time for nothing.

Listing soft skills, on the other hand, can be a bit different. The problem with those is that they’re not tangible. Everyone can just mention that they have “leadership” skills on their resume - whether they’re the CEO of a multi-million dollar company or just a student.

If you’d like your soft skills to have an impact, try mentioning specific experiences.

Depending on your field and experience, there might be some other sections you’d want to add to your resume.

These don't have much of an effect on your resume layout, since formatting them is pretty simple. So, let’s go through each of them briefly.

Now that you know how the resume layout works, you might want to master the content. Having a working layout is just the step #1 of creating a killer resume.

Learn everything there is to know about creating a resume with our complete guide.

If you already know how that works, though, then you might just want to start building your resume.