What to Include on a Resume (Sections Checklist)

Half the lines on a typical resume are taking up space they didn’t earn.

A recruiter spends about seven seconds on the first pass, and roughly 80% of that attention lands on the top third of the page. Every section you include is competing for that glance. The question isn’t “what could I add?” It’s “what proves I fit, fast?”

The sections that always earn their place

Three sections are non-negotiable, and a parser expects them under standard names:

• Contact — name, phone, professional email, city, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if relevant. Keep it in the body of the document, never the header or footer, where an ATS may not read it.
• Experience — recent roles in reverse-chronological order, each with two to four bullets focused on results. This is the section recruiters open first.
• Education — degree, institution, and year; graduation dates can come off once you’re well into your career.

A summary belongs near the top too, especially for senior specialists and career changers: three or four lines naming your specialism, experience, and one real achievement.

Make the experience section about numbers

The single biggest content problem isn’t a missing section. It’s empty ones. Cultivated Culture analysed over 125,000 resumes and found 36% had zero measurable metrics. Yet quantified achievements make a resume about 40% more likely to reach the shortlist (TalentWorks). “Managed a team” says little; “led a team of 12 to beat targets by 23%” says you deliver. Put a number in as many bullets as you honestly can.

Order it for your stage, not by template

The safe ATS-friendly sequence is summary, experience, skills, education, then extras. But move things to match your strongest evidence. Recent graduates should pull education and projects up, because that’s what they have to show. Mid-career professionals lead with experience. A skills section sits well just under the summary, organised with the actual terms from the jobs you’re targeting.

Optional sections (projects, certifications, volunteering, awards) earn a spot only when they support the role or fill a real gap. A developer’s side projects matter. A list of unrelated hobbies doesn’t.

What to cut

This is where most resumes can win back space:

• “References available upon request.” Everyone assumes it; it tells a recruiter nothing.
• Your full street address. City and region are plenty.
• Date of birth, marital status, and a photo, at least for US, UK, and Irish applications, where they invite bias and add no value.
• Jobs older than 10 to 15 years, unless one is directly relevant.
• Soft-skill adjective dumps. “Hardworking, detail-oriented team player” is a claim with no proof. Show it in a bullet instead, or leave it out.

Match the words, not just the sections

Having the right sections doesn’t help if they use the wrong words. An ATS matches the exact terms from the job description, so your skills and experience should echo the employer’s vocabulary: “project management,” not “ran projects.” Pull the 10 to 15 terms that matter most from the posting and work them in where they’re true, spread naturally across your summary, skills, and a recent bullet or two rather than piled into one keyword block.

And on the experience section, turn duties into outcomes. “Handled customer complaints” becomes “resolved 40+ support tickets a week and lifted satisfaction scores from 72 to 89.” Same job, completely different signal. The duty says what you were assigned; the outcome proves what you changed.

Tailor what stays

Including the right sections is half the job. The other half is adjusting their contents per role: which bullets lead, which keywords appear, what the summary emphasises. About 61% of recruiters dismiss a resume that clearly wasn’t matched to the job (CareerBuilder). A resume builder makes it easy to keep your sections consistent while you swap the emphasis for each application.

Treat page-one space like the scarce resource it is. If a line doesn’t help a recruiter answer “why this person, for this job,” it’s costing you one of your seven seconds.