How to Write a Resume That Gets You an Interview

Most resume advice assumes you already work in an office. Quantify your quarterly results. Describe your cross-functional projects. Highlight your stakeholder management. If you’ve spent the last six years on a warehouse floor, behind a register, or driving a route, none of that gives you much to work with.

Your work has numbers in it, though. You hit accuracy targets, trained new hires, or covered the shifts nobody else would take. Hiring teams want that information, and most people leave it off because it doesn’t sound like the resume advice they’ve read. If you got your skills on the job instead of in a classroom, you’re a STAR worker, and a resume is where that has to show up.

What Goes on the Page & In What Order

1. Name and contact block.
2. Summary statement. Three or four lines. Optional, but it’s valuable when your history is thin or you’re changing fields.
3. Skills. Six to ten items.
4. Work experience. Most recent job first, three to five bullets each.
5. Education, training, and certifications.

If your training is more recent than your work history, or more relevant to the job you want, swap the last two so training sits above experience. If you’re wondering where something goes, and it isn’t on this list, you can probably delete it.

Step 1: Read the Job Posting First

Before you touch your resume, pull up the posting somewhere you can mark it up. Underline every word that names a skill, a tool, or a task. Those words are what the hiring team scans for, and they’re often the exact words you want in your resume.

Keyword stuffing isn’t the goal. If the posting asks for someone who can handle cash reconciliation and you’ve done cash reconciliation, write cash reconciliation. Don’t write “money handling” and hope somebody makes the connection. Match their wording where the work matches, and leave it alone where it doesn’t.

You’ll end up with a slightly different resume for each posting. That sounds like a lot of work until you notice you’re changing maybe six lines. Save each one as its own file so you don’t upload the wrong version. If you need postings to practice on, every listing on our job board has been screened following our quality standards first.

Step 2: Build the Top Block

• Start with your name, your phone number, an email address, and your city and state.
• Leave off your street address.
• Use an email address that’s some version of your name. If you don’t have one, it’s quick and free to make a new Gmail account.
• Skip the objective statement, the one that says you’re seeking a challenging position where you can grow. (A summary statement is a different thing, and there’s more on writing one further down; the Key Skills Summary template gives you the format.)

Step 3: Write Your Experience Bullets

Most resumes list duties. “Responsible for stocking shelves.” “Answered customer questions.” A hiring manager reads twenty of those in a row and won’t remember one.

Watch what happens when you fix one. Start with the dead version:

• Responsible for stocking shelves.

First, cut the throat-clearing and name what you did:

• Stocked shelves.

Still nothing, because there’s no size to it. Add the scale:

• Stocked and faced 12 aisles per overnight shift.

Now a hiring manager knows what kind of night you worked. Last, add what happened because you did it well:

• Stocked and faced 12 aisles per overnight shift, keeping the floor set for open with no carryover to the day crew.

You don’t have to name every step of that process on the page. You do need what you did and what happened because of it in the same sentence.

Here are a few more bullets written in the same way:

• Retail: Trained six seasonal hires on register and returns during the holiday rush, cutting average checkout time from four minutes to under two.
• Warehouse: Picked and packed an average of 180 orders per shift at 99.6% accuracy across 14 months.
• Food service: Handled closing solo three nights a week, including cash reconciliation, inventory counts, and prep for the morning crew.
• Home health: Supported 12 residents per shift, tracked vitals, and flagged changes in condition to nursing staff before they turned into emergencies.
• Delivery: Completed 40 to 60 stops a day on a 90-mile route with no preventable incidents in two years.
• Call center: Took 70 calls a day and held customer satisfaction above 94% through a three-week system outage.
• Custodial: Cut supply spending 18% by switching to concentrate dispensers and training the crew on dilution ratios.

None of those say “hardworking” or “detail-oriented.” The numbers make a better case because a hiring manager can picture what you’re describing. If you don’t know your numbers, estimate low and stay there. “Roughly 40 stops a day” beats no number, and it beats a figure you can’t stand behind in the interview. Our coaches put together a short walkthrough on pairing numbers with your experience if you get stuck.

Step 4: Choose Your Skills

Your skills section is a short list, usually six to ten items, and it sits above your work experience. Split it between what you were taught and what you picked up by doing.

• Skills like forklift certification, CPR, ServSafe, QuickBooks, or a particular POS system go first, because they’re easy to validate.
• Then, list your durable (or transferable) skills, like de-escalation, scheduling, or training new people. We’ve broken down the job skills employers look for one by one, with wording you can borrow.

Leave off skills that aren’t relevant to the job you’re applying for. 

Step 5: Place Your Education and Training

List certifications, online courses, apprenticeships, and programs you finished (with the year). Put the ones that connect to this job first, because that’s what a hiring manager is scanning for.

This section normally sits at the bottom. Move it above your work experience when your training is more recent or more relevant than your last job. That’s common right after you finish a program and start applying in the field it trained you for.

If you’re partway through a program, give the expected finish date instead so nobody reads a blank line and assumes you dropped it. If you don’t have a credential to list yet and that’s the thing standing between you and the job, we can connect you to free and low-cost training that takes weeks rather than years.

Step 6: Format It So ATS Software Can Read It

• One page if you’ve got under ten years of history, two at most.
• One readable font at 10 to 12 point.
• Left-align everything.
• Skip the photo, graphics, or fun colors.
• Use plain section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Those parse without trouble.
• Avoid text boxes, multiple columns, tables, and headers, since those sometimes trip up parsers.
• Save as .docx or PDF unless the posting says otherwise, and put your name in the file name.

Our interview and resume resources go deeper on what happens between hitting submit and hearing back.

Step 7: Get Somebody Else to Read It

Proofread it, then hand it to another person. You’ve read your own resume so many times that your eyes glide right over the typo in your own job title. A friend will catch it in thirty seconds. So will a coach with our free coaching resources.

What Applicant Tracking Systems Do & What They Don’t

Almost every mid-size employer uses an applicant tracking system. It’s a database that stores your application, pulls out fields like job titles and dates, and lets a recruiter sort and search through hundreds of people at once.

The software isn’t reading your bullets and grading your writing, it isn’t scoring you in secret, and it can’t detect whether you used AI to draft something. What it does do is filter on structured criteria before any person sees your file, and those filters are tighter than most people expect.

A Harvard Business School and Accenture study surveyed more than 2,250 employers, and 94% said qualified middle-skills candidates get screened out because they don’t match the exact criteria in the job description. Forty-eight percent said their system filters out applicants with a gap of more than six months in their work history. 

That’s why matching the posting’s language back in Step 1 isn’t cosmetic, because a filter looking for “point of sale” doesn’t recognize “register experience” as the same thing. And a gap in your history is better handled on the page than left for somebody to notice, which the questions below cover.

The good news is that the silence after you reply isn’t a judgment of your value or skill. Many job postings draw hundreds (if not thousands!) of applicants, and most employers interview only a handful of them. It’s a numbers game that doesn’t determine whether you’re well-suited for the job. Our guide to free AI job search tools goes further into what happens after you hit submit.

Writing a Resume When You Don’t Have Much Experience

Plenty of people write a first resume with no formal job history. Others have history that ended a decade ago and feels too old to count. 

Count all of it: volunteer work, caregiving, church or community roles, side work, coursework, a certificate you finished last spring. If you’ve kept a household going on a tight budget, you’ve got budgeting experience. If you organized a fundraiser, you have project management experience. Write them as bullets using Step 3, with the action and the result together.

This is where the summary statement can help you. Write three or four lines about who you are, what your goals are, and what you bring to the table. This gives the reader context. It might look like this:

• Certified nursing assistant, newly licensed, with four years of caregiving for family members and a year of volunteer work at a county senior center. Looking for a full-time CNA role on a long-term care floor.

How to List Gig Work, Temp Jobs, and Short Stints

Grouping similar work helps it look intentional rather than scattered.

Temp agency placements go under the agency as one entry, with the assignments listed underneath. If you had three placements through one agency, then that experience becomes one entry with three assignments under it. That looks better than three jobs in 18 months.

Also, gig work is work, so give yourself a title and a date range. “Rideshare and Delivery Driver, Self-Employed, 2023 to present” is a job entry. Add bullet points like any other entry, such as miles driven, orders completed, ratings held.

Label seasonal jobs as seasonal. Put that word next to a three-month warehouse job that started in November to better convey that it was a temporary position and not one you quit.

Several short jobs in the same line of work can combine into one entry with a shared title and the employers listed beneath it. And a job you held for two weeks doesn’t need to be on there at all (unless it’s extremely relevant). If a string of short jobs is telling you something about the fit rather than the market, our career research tools are a better place to start than another rewrite.

Templates You Can Start From

A blank page is the hardest part of this, and you don’t have to start from one! SkillUp keeps three free templates you can copy and fill in:

• The key skills summary leads with what you can do. Use it when your history has gaps, or when you’re switching fields and your last job title works against you.
• The skills-at-top layout keeps a normal work section but puts your abilities above it, which suits people with a steady history in the same field.
• The chronological snapshot is the standard reverse-order format. Use it when your recent jobs already point toward the one you want.

Whichever one you choose, save a copy to your own computer so you can edit the contents. Fill in the bullets you wrote in Step 3, then cut whatever doesn’t help you get this particular job.

Now Get It in Front of Somebody

You have a resume. What improves it from here is another reader, not another pass on your own.

That’s why we offer free career coaching resources. You can watch past webinars or connect with a coach on-demand or via text, and it costs nothing. Bring the version you just wrote, including the bullets you’re unsure about, because those are the ones a coach can fix fastest.

Then start sending it. Every listing on our job board has been screened by our quality standards, so the resume you just made goes somewhere that deserves it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I put volunteer work on my resume?

Yes! Especially if your paid history is thin or has a gap in it. Volunteer work shows you kept working when nobody was paying you, and it usually comes with skills attached. Write it in the same format as a job.

What do I do about gaps in my work history?

You don’t need to draw attention to them, and you don’t need to apologize for them. You do need to handle them, because 48% of employers in that Harvard study said their software screens out applicants with a gap longer than six months. Listing years instead of months is normal practice, and it keeps a short gap from reading as a hole. For a longer one, a skills-forward layout puts your abilities in front of your timeline, and filling the gap with a course, volunteer work, caregiving, or contract work gives a reader something to look at instead of blank space. If it comes up in the interview, one sentence about the gap and one about what you did with the time will cover it.

I’m changing fields. Do I list every job I’ve ever had?

No. Your resume makes a case for one job. It isn’t a record of your life. Keep what supports the case, summarize or drop the rest, and translate what stays.

How far back should my resume go?

Ten to fifteen years is plenty for most people, and you don’t need to account for every year before that. Older work can be one line under a heading like Earlier Experience, or left off. You’re also not obligated to list graduation years, and many people leave them off once they’re a decade out.

Do I need references on there?

No. “References available upon request” is a line you can delete and get back for a more useful bullet point. 

Should I write a cover letter?

Write one when the posting asks for one, and when you want to explain something the resume can’t, like a career change or a long gap. Keep it to three short paragraphs. Nobody has ever complained that a cover letter was too short.