Tells us about yourself! Here are some best practices for making the most out of your Personal Info section:

Phone Number - Always include your phone number at the top of your resume so employers can easily get in touch with you.

Email - Did you know that ~75% of resumes with an unprofessional email address are rejected? Don’t let your awesome experience get overlooked because you used something that looks like an AOL screen name from 15 years ago. Instead, use a “professional” email -- your name or a variation of it is perfect:

If you don’t have a professional email address, you can create a new Gmail or Outlook just for the job search.

We also recommend creating a link to your email address in your resume so people can easily get in touch with you!

Location - We do not recommend including your location if the application or employer doesn’t require it. It takes up valuable space and including it typically does more harm than good.

LinkedIn - According to a recent study, resumes that include a hyperlink to a LinkedIn profile have a 71% better chance of getting called back. We always recommend including a link to your LinkedIn profile on your resume and you can use the hyperlink formatting to make it easy for employers to click through.

Like your email, make sure to customize your LinkedIn profile URL so it’s professional and easy to read. Here's a guide on customizing your LinkedIn URL.

Adding Additional Links - At the bottom of this section, you’ll see an option to “Add New Field.” This is your chance to add additional info or custom links right at the top of your resume.

Have an online portfolio of amazing work? Include it here!

Frequently updating your GitHub to show off awesome projects? Link it up!

Showcasing your work on Instagram or Behance? Add it in!

Do you blog about industry topics? Show people where to find your posts!

Your resume objective serves two major functions:

First, it’s a great place for you to inject relevant keywords and experience to help you beat the resume scanning robots. Second, it’s the first thing a human is going to look at, making it a huge opportunity to grab their attention and hook them in.

We recommend leveraging 3-5 bullets that highlight your best and most relevant experience for the role, like this:

Let’s break down each element in this section so you can make the most of it:

Job Title - When a robot is scanning your resume, one of the first things it looks for is a relevant job title. The two best places you can include that are in the Resume Objective title and at the beginning of the first bullet.

For example, if you want a Project Manager role your Resume Objective title should be "Project Management Summary" and your first bullet should lead with "Project Manager..."

Bullet #1 - This bullet should be a one sentence introduction to who you are, how much experience you have, and what you’ve accomplished.

Example: Marketing manager with 7+ years of experience driving $27M of incremental revenue via inbound campaigns for brands like Equinox, Planet Fitness, Crunch, etc.

Bullets #2 - 4: These bullets should be a highlight reel of your greatest (and most relevant) achievements. I like to think of them as mini-case studies which introduce the situation, speak to your actions, and illustrate results. Include at least one of these but no more than three.

Example: Managed a team of 4 to spearhead link-building SEO campaign, resulting in 500+ earned links, a 276% increase in monthly traffic, and $249k of incremental revenue

Bullet #5: The final bullet is a great place to speak to any relevant “extracurricular” activities. For example, if the role is looking for a diverse and inclusive leader, you might mention that you volunteer at the AdColor Summit or mentor high school students in underprivileged areas on the weekend. This bullet is optional and best leveraged to highlight an area of cultural fit.

Example: I teach young kids how to code as a volunteer at STEM Kids in NYC on the weekend

Finally, you want to make your bullets relevant to the job description to boot your chances of beating the resume scanning robots. Here’s a quick way to find out what you need to include:

1. Go to the online job description for the role that you want
2. Highlight the entire job description and hit Ctl + C (Cmd + C on Mac) to copy it
3. Go to Wordclouds.com, click Word List, then click Paste/Type Text, and paste the job description here
4. Click Apply
5. Click on Word List again to see the most common words and phrases. Remove the filler words (and, the, it, etc.) and you’ll have a list of the most important keywords to include on your resume!

Resumes can be boring. They’re a bunch of ink on an 8.5x11” piece of paper -- where’s the fun in that?

Adding a unique and personalized interests section is one of the best ways to stand out and build a connection with the reader.

There are a number of topics that aren’t controversial and can spark a conversation. The main ones are:

• Food & Drink
• Travel
• Hobbies
• Sports

The trick is to take it a level deeper and be more specific about your interest. Everyone loves to travel, but that’s not going to spark a conversation.

But if you say that your favorite memory is scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef or your top two bucket list locations are Kyoto and Jordan, now we’re on to something. That’s an immediate conversation start for anyone who has been to those places or wants to go!

Here is what my interests section looked like when I interviewed at Google, Microsoft, and Twitter:

Interests: Upland’s Caesar Salad, walking the trail from Oia to Thira in Santorini, fishing (especially fly), foods that are vehicles for hot sauce (Cholula is my favorite), skiing (Snowbird’s mineral basin is my all time favorite spot), and brewing my own beer (currently brewing a single hop Citra IPA)

If anyone has done or is remotely interested in those things, I’ve got an immediate connection and conversation starter.

Now it’s your turn, what do you love to do?

Note: Use your discretion with this section. Some companies and industries are more formal and might view this as unprofessional. Those tend to be more traditional places so you should use your best judgement here.

Master The Basics
Before we dive into the nitty gritty of writing bullets that pop off the page, we want to make sure your bases are covered. Here are some fundamentals:

• Use bullets, not paragraphs or blocks of text. Research has shown that bullets are a better medium for conveying information on resumes.

The Anatomy Of A Highly Effective Resume Bullet
I’ve run experiments with thousands of resumes across industries and levels of experience (from entry level employees to CEOs).

When we’re writing resume bullets, the words we use typically fall into four buckets: Industy Terms, Measurable Metrics, Action/Power Words, and Common Words.

Here is the mix that I’ve found to generate the best results:

This formula is powerful for a few reasons:

• It leverages principles of copywriting (the science of using the written word to persuade people to take an action)
• It forces you to include the results that came from the work you did, something employers love to see that most job seekers leave out
• It offers a natural way for us to include industry terms, skills, and keywords that resume robots will be scanning for

Here are a few examples of this formula in action:

Example #1 - Our first example focuses on a customer support representative who reworked her company’s ticket triage process to reduce their backlog:

This bullet is a nice length (16 words) and its word balance comes out to:

• 13% Action Words (developed, eliminated)
• 38% Industry Terms (tiered, triage, system, JIRA, ticket, backlog)
• 38% Common Words (that, of, in, less, than, weeks)
• 11% Measurable Metrics (40%, 8)

Example #2 - This marketer who leveraged customer data to refine targeting on the company’s digital advertising, increasing sales and lowering cost-per-lead:

This bullet is 18 words long and balances out to:

• 17% Action Words (overhauled, comprehensive, shot)
• 39% Uncommon / Industry Related Words (digital, ad, targeting, customer, data, analysis, CPA)
• 33% Common Words (based, on, up, while, dropped, sales)
• 11% Measurable Metrics (37%, 18%)

Both of these examples match our word balance almost perfectly.

See how the right information pops off the page and the overall bullet is quick and easy to read? That’s what we’re going for.

For more detailed information on writing great resume bullets along with a huge list of action words you can copy/paste, check out this article.

Where Should Your Education Go?
If you have been in the workforce for more than a year, your education should go towards the bottom of your resume. Employers will usually seek it out anyways so we don’t want to use up valuable space at the top.

If you’re still in school or you graduated in the past 12 months, you can list your education at the top of your resume.

What Should You Include?
When listing your education, you want to make sure to include your fields of study as well as the name of the school you attended.

If you’re a younger applicant, you may want to include your graduation year. If you’re a more experienced applicant, you don’t need to include the years in your resume.

Be sure to list anything notable (graduating Cum Laude, extra-curriculars, relevant coursework, etc.)

Highlight your proficiency with different skills, platforms, and technologies that the company is asking for in the job description. This will help boost your chances of beating the resume scanning robots as well as increasing relevance with anyone reading your resume.