10 Things You Absolutely Need On Your Resume

Resume advice has gotten weird.

Depending on where you look, you’re told that your resume needs a summary, an objective, a list of skills, every job you’ve ever had, certifications, hobbies, coursework, keywords, achievements, volunteer work, and possibly the blood type of your first manager.

It doesn’t.

A good resume isn’t supposed to document your entire professional existence. It’s supposed to make a convincing case that you’re worth interviewing for a particular job.

That distinction matters.

Every section, bullet point, and line of text on your resume should help answer at least one of these questions:

What can you do?
How well can you do it?
What have you accomplished?
Do you have the experience or knowledge this job requires?
Why does your background make sense for this particular position?

If something isn’t helping answer one of those questions, you should seriously consider whether it deserves space on the page.

So, what should actually be on your resume?

Let’s break it down.

1. Your Name and Useful Contact Information

Let’s start with the easy stuff.

At the top of your resume, include:

Your name
Phone number
Professional email address
City and state
LinkedIn URL, if your profile is current and useful
Portfolio or professional website, if relevant

That’s generally enough.

You usually don’t need your complete street address. Employers need to know roughly where you’re located, particularly if the job is onsite or hybrid. They don’t need directions to your front door.

And please make sure the contact information is accurate.

A beautifully written resume attached to an email address you haven’t checked since 2019 is not going to do you much good.

BONUS TIP: If your email address is “SexiMami2001@hotmail.com”, please go ahead and change that to something a little less salacious, like FirstNameLastName@gmail.com”.

2. A Professional Summary That Actually Says Something

A professional summary can be useful, but only when it communicates something meaningful.

One of the most common resume problems is a “summary” that is really an objective:

Seeking a challenging position with a growing company where I can utilize my skills and grow professionally.

This tells an employer almost nothing about you. And to keep it real, employers don’t really give a flim flam about what you’re seeking. They care about what THEY are seeking.

Of course you’re seeking a position. That’s why you sent them a resume.

Your professional summary should instead give the reader a quick snapshot of what you can bring to the position.

For example:

Customer service professional with five years of experience supporting customers in high-volume retail and call center environments. Skilled in conflict resolution, account support, CRM systems, and de-escalating complex customer concerns.

Now the reader knows something useful about you.

A strong summary usually communicates some combination of:

Your professional area or specialty
Your level or amount of relevant experience
Your strongest relevant skills
Your industry experience
A particularly interesting accomplishment or qualification

And here’s an important word: relevant.

You don’t need to cram every good thing about yourself into three sentences. The summary should introduce the version of your professional background that matters most for the job you’re pursuing.

BONUS TIP: Include a quantitative piece of information about your accomplishments or experience in your summary.

3. A Skills Section Based on Skills Employers Actually Want

Yes, your resume should probably have a skills section.

No, it should not be a dumping ground for every positive adjective you can think of.

Avoid filling it with things like:

Hard worker | Motivated | Friendly | Team player | Dependable

Those may all be true, but they’re difficult to prove and don’t tell an employer much about what you can actually do. Writing those out on this blog post actually made me snore. Do you want people snoring when they read your resume? Probably not.

Prioritize specific, job-relevant skills, especially ones that appear in the job posting.

Depending on your field, that might include things like:

Microsoft Excel
Salesforce
Adobe Creative Suite
SQL
Technical writing
Project management
Data analysis
Customer relationship management
Curriculum development
Inventory management
Electronic health records
Languages you can speak (i.e., Bilingual Spanish/English)

The exact skills will obviously depend on the position.

That is precisely the point.

BONUS TIP: Change your skills section when you are applying for different roles.

If a job posting repeatedly mentions a particular software program, certification, technical skill, or competency and you genuinely have that skill, don’t make the employer hunt through your resume hoping to find evidence of it. Put it where they can see it.

4. Work Experience That Shows More Than Your Job Description

This is where a lot of resumes lose their power. People frequently write their experience section by asking:

“What did I do at this job?”

A better question is:

“What did I do, how did I do it, and what happened because I did it?”

Compare these two bullets:

Assisted customers with questions. (BORING!)

versus:

Resolved 40+ daily customer inquiries involving billing, account access, and service issues while maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction rating.

Both describe customer service.

Only one gives us a sense of the person’s actual experience and performance. Did you notice those juicy, juicy quantitative details included in the second example?

Whenever possible, your experience bullets should communicate scope, results, complexity, improvement, or impact.

That means looking for numbers.

Think about:

How many customers did you serve?
How many employees did you support?
How many projects did you manage?
How large was the budget?
How much revenue did you generate?
How much money did you save?
How quickly did you complete something?
Did you increase sales?
Did you reduce errors?
Did you improve satisfaction?
Did you train employees?
How many employees did you train?
Did you manage a team?
How large was the team(s) you managed?
Did you improve a process?

And no, you don’t need a mind-blowing achievement for every bullet. Sometimes the number simply provides scale.

“Processed invoices” is vague.

“Processed approximately 150 invoices weekly” tells us much more.

“Trained new employees” is mid as hell.

“Trained and onboarded 12 new employees” is stronger.

Numbers make abstract work concrete.

BONUS TIP: Don’t make up stuff, though.

If you don’t know that you increased productivity by 37%, don’t announce that you increased productivity by 37%.

You’re writing your resume, not fiction.

Use numbers you can reasonably defend. If exact figures aren’t available, you can often use approximate quantities, frequencies, ranges, team sizes, caseloads, project counts, or other measures of scope.

5. Bullets That Start With Strong, Specific Language

Your experience section should sound like you were actively doing things, not hugging the watercolor or porcelain throne the whole time you were at work.

Instead of repeatedly writing:

Responsible for…
Helped with…
Worked on…
Duties included…
Assisted with…

BORING!

Use stronger verbs that describe what you actually did:

Coordinated
Developed
Managed
Resolved
Analyzed
Designed
Implemented
Trained
Improved
Created
Facilitated
Reduced
Increased
Maintained
Investigated
Led

BONUS TIP: Be specific!

The goal isn’t to grab the fanciest verb from a thesaurus. The goal is specificity.

“Helped with reports” and “Analyzed weekly sales data and prepared performance reports for regional leadership” describe very different levels of responsibility.

Your language should make that difference visible.

6. Education, Without Turning It Into Your Entire Academic Biography

Your education section should generally include:

Degree or credential
Major or field of study
School
Location, if useful
Graduation date or expected graduation date, when appropriate

Recent graduates and current students may also include academic honors, relevant coursework, significant projects, or other academic experiences.

BONUS TIP: Coursework should actually be relevant.

If you’re applying for an IT support position and you’ve completed courses in networking, cybersecurity, database management, or computer systems, listing relevant coursework could strengthen your application.

If you’re applying for that same IT position and your coursework section includes Art History, Introduction to Sociology, and World Literature simply because you took them, you’re using valuable resume space to tell the employer things they probably don’t need.

The heading is Relevant Coursework, not Courses Where I Kinda Paid Attention.

As you gain more professional experience, coursework usually becomes less important and can often disappear entirely.

7. Certifications and Licenses That Matter for the Position

If you hold certifications, licenses, or professional credentials that are relevant to the work, include them.

Depending on your profession, these could be extremely important.

You might include:

CompTIA A+
PMP
SHRM-CP
Google Analytics certification
Teaching certification
Registered Nurse license
OSHA certifications

Include appropriate expiration dates or credential information when relevant.

BONUS TIP: Prioritize what’s actually relevant and current enough to matter. A certification from 14 years ago in software nobody uses anymore probably doesn’t deserve prime resume real estate simply because you technically earned it.

8. Projects, Volunteer Experience, or Leadership When They Strengthen Your Case

Paid employment isn’t the only place where people develop valuable skills.

Projects, internships, freelance work, volunteer experience, student organizations, military experience, community leadership, and professional organizations can all belong on a resume when they demonstrate qualifications relevant to the position.

This is particularly useful if you’re:

A student
A recent graduate
Changing careers
Returning to the workforce
Building experience in a new field

Suppose you’re applying for a social media role but haven’t officially held a “Social Media Manager” title.

Maybe you managed Instagram and Facebook for a local nonprofit, created its content calendar, increased engagement, and promoted three fundraising events.

That’s relevant experience.

BONUS TIP: So you did something and didn’t get paid? So you helped a friend with something? Don’t dismiss useful experience simply because nobody handed you a traditional paycheck for it.

9. Keywords From the Job Posting, Used Like You Have Some Sense

Your resume should reflect the language employers use to describe the work.

Using relevant keywords and key phrases on your resume and cover letter helps both the humans reviewing your resume and applicant tracking systems used during the hiring process.

Start with the actual job posting.

Look for references to:

Required skills
Software
Certifications
Responsibilities
Industry terminology
Technical competencies
Preferred experience

Then compare those requirements with your background.

If the posting asks for “project management” and your resume only says you “coordinated assignments,” you may be underselling relevant experience.

If the employer specifically wants experience with Salesforce and you’ve used Salesforce for six years, include mentions of Salesforce on your resume and cover letter.

Don’t force recruiters or software systems to solve riddles.

BONUS TIP: A lot of bozos on social media will tell you to copy and paste the job ad onto your resume and use white text to hide your BS.

Please for the love of a fresh pack of linen resume paper, please don’t pull that kind of stunt. If YOU were a recruiter and noticed that some bozo used white text to hide the entire job ad on their resume, would YOU push them to the next step in the hiring process? Or would you throw that resume into the BOZOs Pile and go on about your day?

Right, I thought so.

The goal is alignment, not foolishness.

10. Evidence That Supports the Job You Want Next

This might be the most important principle in this entire article.

Your resume doesn’t exist primarily to document where you’ve been.

It exists to help you get where you’re trying to go next.

Imagine two people with nearly identical professional histories applying for two different jobs.

One wants to move into project management.

The other wants to move into operations.

Their resumes shouldn’t necessarily look identical.

The project management candidate might emphasize:

Cross-functional projects
Timelines
Stakeholder communication
Deliverables
Risk management
Project tools

The operations candidate might emphasize:

Process improvement
Efficiency
Quality control
Workflow management
Cost reduction
Operational metrics

Same history. Different story.

That’s what tailoring a resume actually means.

You’re not changing the facts. You’re deciding which facts deserve the focus.

Before You Send That Resume…

Here’s the big takeaway: Your resume does not need to contain everything you’ve ever done. It needs to contain the right information for the job you’re trying to get.

Before you hit “Apply,” pull up the job posting and your resume side by side.

Can you quickly see the skills they’re asking for? The experience that proves you can do the work? A few accomplishments that show you didn’t just show up, jiggle your mouse around for eight hours, and go home?

If not, you’ve probably got a little more editing to do.

But if you’ve got these 10 things covered, you’re already giving employers something much more useful than a generic list of jobs and responsibilities.

You’re giving them a reason to keep reading.

And that’s exactly what your resume is supposed to do.

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