Best Practice for Résumés in 2023

• Choose a professional-looking template, avoiding heavy use of tables, logos, boxes, fancy fonts, and splashes of color.
• Use a reverse chronological style, starting each section with the most recent information.  
• Incorporate action verbs that resonate with the reader and provide a clear idea of your skills and achievements. These help you to appear confident and stand out from the other applicants.
• Ditch the objective section – you want to show a prospective employer what you can bring to the table, not what you want out of it.
• Be consistent throughout, ensuring all dates are in the same format, your spacing is even, and fonts are equalized.
• Write in detail about the last 10 to 15 years of work experience, maximum, if you have it. For anything older, just include the job title and name of the company.

Main Sections of a Résumé

Professional Profile

Under your contact details, compile a pithy paragraph, four or five sentences long, showcasing your attributes, while using the third person without pronouns.

For example, "An accomplished Project Manager who draws upon a robust work ethic to manage across a range of industries. A naturally strong leader who articulates a vision that contributes to an organization’s success. Galvanizes team members to perform to potential.”

Top Tip: Include your current job title, unless you’re aiming for a career change.

Skills Matrix

Also referred to as Key Skills, Competencies or Areas of Expertise, this section sits just below the profile and is designed so that recruiters and algorithms can immediately see if you have the skills they want.

Top Tip: Load it with key phrases and words that match the job description.

Career Summary

With hiring managers giving the majority of their time to scanning the work experience section, make sure your concise overview of each position makes the scope of each role’s responsibilities crystal clear.

Top Tip: Include a Key Achievements section for each role, detailing quantifiable outcomes, tangible evidence, and business results.

Professional Development and Qualifications

Formal learning adds value to a résumé, so include all those courses and certificates – as long as they’re relevant.

Top Tip: If you have a college degree, there’s no need to include high-school qualifications.

What to Include 

• Contact details. It’s unbelievable how many times candidates forget to include this vital information. How is a hiring manager going to contact you if your cell phone number isn’t front and center?
• Relevant information. It’s vital that you tailor your résumé each time you apply for a different role.
• Key achievements. Try to include numbers or tangible data wherever possible, as these will really pop out of the page, catching the recruiter’s eye.
• Education. This section is a must, even if it’s just high-school qualifications. This is because ATS require certain elements within the document to give a high score, and the education section is one of them.

What Not to Include   

• Personal details. Including details like date of birth, marital status, religion, and gender just opens you up to discrimination, so avoid.
• Photo. Unless you’re a model, your good looks don’t have any bearing on how well you can perform a role. And again, it can lead to unconscious bias and/or discrimination.
• Full address. You just need your city, state and code.
• References. These used to need to be detailed but now, even the sentence, “References are available upon request” is obsolete. It’s seen as a waste of space, as recruiters only need references at the interview stage.

Only include a cover letter if it’s a requirement.

What's Next?

These days, recruiters will seek to look beyond the résumé and will appreciate a link to your LinkedIn profile, if you have one. The key here is to ensure that your résumé and LinkedIn profile complement one other for consistency across all your professional documents.

Kirk Hallowell’s CAR model can help with getting this consistency just right. CAR stands for Challenge, Action, Results, and the approach is designed to be used across all of your job search components, including your résumé, social networking profiles, and elevator pitch. Basically, every time you mention your achievements, you should apply this structure.

Here’s a breakdown of what to include:

Challenge – a brief but relevant example of a challenge you overcame.

Action – a short description of how you overcame the challenge.

Results – detail the specific results that this action achieved.

Read or listen to the The Million Dollar Race Book Insight on mindtools.com to discover more about the CAR approach, and what else you can do to boost your chances of getting your dream job!

And for even more résumé tips, read the Mind Tools article, Writing Your Résumé (CV).

Tip of the Week

Set a Boundary With Your Boss

By Yolandé Conradie, Mind Tools Coach

I heard of someone who found it almost impossible to enjoy one evening or weekend in peace because her boss would contact her out of hours. It was usually about something that could have been addressed during the workday, but the manager was often engaged then in playing golf, attending business lunches, or shopping with family.

I'm not saying those things aren't important, but when a person is unavailable so often that it interferes with the private life of their team members, something has to change.

But setting boundaries – even healthy ones – often evokes guilt and fear in ourselves. In the Mind Tools Expert Interview, Set Boundaries, Find Peace, therapist and author Nedra Glover Tawwab advises to sit with these feelings rather than ignore them, but also to be conscious that you’re making a healthy choice.

So, work on reframing your thoughts from "I’m doing a bad thing” to "I’m doing something that is essential for my wellbeing." And then have that difficult conversation!

Pain Points Podcast

Don't miss the latest episode of the Pain Points podcast!  

This week’s episode covers the difficulties of team-building activities. Join Mind Tools senior editor and writer Jonathan Hancock and his guests to hear their experiences – good and bad – as well as their tips for getting the most out of team-building exercises.

Keep an eye on your inbox for your unique link to the podcast, sent every Tuesday. You can listen on your browser or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

News Roundup

This Week's Global Workplace Insights

The companies blocking ChatGPT

A growing number of companies are preventing ChatGPT from reading their content. CNN, Disney and The New York Times are the latest names to have reportedly changed their code, blocking ChatGPT’s crawlers from scanning their sites.

The defensive move seeks to protect publishers’ valuable content from misuse, but it could mean a reduction in quality for ChatGPT’s learning and output. Developers rely heavily on content from reputable publishers to train their AI systems, so with more big names blocking ChatGPT, OpenAI might struggle to improve its product in the near future.

Read more from CNN

Win small talk with this short phrase

Public speaking expert and Stanford lecturer, Matt Abrahams, recently shared his insights on how small talk can cultivate big benefits – and he revealed his go-to phrase.  

The best phrase to use, he says, is, “Tell me more.”

Abrahams says that this is a “support response” – a phrase that invites the other person to expand on what they’re saying. The opposite is a “shift response,” which brings the spotlight back to yourself.

Shift responses shouldn’t be avoided entirely, he writes, but use too many and you’ll miss out on opportunities to learn about the other person. Instead, the more you practice support responses, the more enjoyable and easier small talk becomes.

Tell me more

See you next week for more member-exclusive content and insight from the Mind Tools team!