How to Write a Resume: Sections, Bullets and an Example

To write a resume, list your contact details, a three-line summary, your work experience in reverse chronological order, your skills and your education, in one column with standard headings. Under each job, write three to six bullet points that start with an action verb and say what changed because you were there. Then cut it to one page, or two if you have a long relevant history, and adjust it for each job you apply to.

That is the whole method. The rest of this guide explains each step, shows the difference between a weak bullet and a strong one, and ends with a complete resume you can copy the structure from.

Start with a master document, not the resume

Before you open a template, collect everything in one plain document. A resume is a selection, and you cannot select well from memory.

For every job you have held, write down:

• your exact title, the employer, the city and the start and end month
• what you were responsible for, in plain words
• anything you built, fixed, improved, launched, trained or saved
• numbers you actually know: team size, budget, volume, time saved, customers served
• tools, systems, languages and certifications you used

Do the same for education, courses, volunteer work and side projects. This master document is never sent to anyone. It is the warehouse you pull from each time you write a version for a specific posting, and it makes tailoring a resume to a job description a twenty-minute job instead of an evening.

Choose a format

Use a reverse chronological format, one column, with standard section headings. It shows your most recent work first, which is what a reader wants, and it is the layout applicant tracking systems read most predictably.

Applicant tracking software reads your file as text in reading order and copies it into fields such as job title, employer and dates. Anything that breaks that reading order (two columns, text boxes, skills shown as icons or rating bars, contact details in the document header) can scramble or drop information. The ATS resume guide covers this in detail.

A functional resume, which lists skills and hides the timeline, is usually a poor choice. Readers find it hard to tell what you did where. If you are changing careers, keep the chronological order and use your summary and the first bullets of each role to point at the transferable work.

The sections, in order

A standard resume has five core sections, in this order:

1. Contact details
2. Summary
3. Work experience
4. Skills
5. Education

Add certifications, languages, or projects after these when they are relevant to the job. Recent graduates can move education above experience.

Contact details

Your name, city and country, phone number with country code, email address and LinkedIn URL, as plain text at the top of the page. A full street address is not needed. If you are applying across borders, add your work authorization in a few words, for example "EU citizen" or "Work permit valid for Germany", because it answers a question the reader will otherwise have.

Summary

Three lines that say who you are professionally, what you are good at, and what you want next, using the job title you are applying for. Skip "hard-working team player". Write what you would say if a hiring manager asked "So what do you do?" in a lift. The resume summary examples show the pattern for many job titles.

Work experience

Each entry has a title, employer, location and dates, followed by bullet points. Give the most space to your last two roles and less to older ones. This section decides most applications, so it has its own guide: how to write the work experience section.

Skills

A short list of hard skills, tools and certifications, written as words: "SQL, Power BI, Salesforce, Finnish (B2)". Rating bars and percentages carry no searchable text and say nothing a reader can trust. Spell tools the way job postings spell them.

Education

Degree, field, institution, country and graduation year. Add a thesis, honours or relevant coursework only if you graduated recently or they matter for this job. If your degree is from another country, a one-line equivalent helps a foreign reader, for example "equivalent to a master's degree".

Write bullet points that show results

A good bullet point says what you did and what happened because of it. The simplest structure is: action verb, then the task, then the result or scale.

Most first drafts describe duties. Duties tell the reader what the job was. Results tell them what you did with it. Here is the same work written both ways.

Before:

• Responsible for customer support tickets
• Handled social media accounts
• Helped with month-end closing

After:

• Resolved around 40 support tickets a day across email and chat, and wrote 12 help-centre articles that answered the most repeated questions
• Ran the company's Instagram and LinkedIn accounts, growing LinkedIn followers from 1,800 to 5,200 in a year with a weekly case-study post
• Prepared accruals and bank reconciliations for month-end close, and built a checklist that moved the close from day 8 to day 5

Each "after" bullet starts with a verb, names the work concretely and gives a scale or outcome. Use numbers you actually know; an honest estimate ("around 40 a day") is fine, an invented one is not. If you need a stronger verb than "managed" or "helped", the action verbs list is built for exactly that.

A worked example

This is a fictional candidate, an accountant who moved from India to Finland. Every name and number is invented, but the structure is the point.

ANANYA IYER
Espoo, Finland | +358 40 000 0000 | [email protected]
linkedin.com/in/ananyaiyer | EU Blue Card holder

SUMMARY
Accountant with six years in month-end close, reconciliations and IFRS
reporting for mid-sized manufacturing companies. Strong in SAP and Excel,
building Power BI reporting. Looking for a financial accountant role in
the Helsinki region.

WORK EXPERIENCE
Financial Accountant, Nordline Components Oy, Vantaa, Finland
Feb 2024 to Present
- Own the month-end close for two legal entities, including accruals,
  intercompany reconciliations and VAT reporting
- Built a Power BI dashboard for cost-centre spend used by 9 budget owners
  in monthly reviews
- Cut the close from 7 to 5 working days by moving 14 manual
  reconciliations into SAP standard reports

Senior Accounts Executive, Mehta Engineering Pvt Ltd, Pune, India
(industrial pumps manufacturer, about 600 employees)
Jul 2019 to Dec 2023
- Prepared IFRS-based monthly reports for the group parent in Germany
- Led the fixed asset register clean-up of 3,000 assets before an audit,
  with no audit findings on fixed assets that year
- Trained 4 junior accountants on SAP FI posting and reconciliation

Accounts Assistant, Mehta Engineering Pvt Ltd, Pune, India
Jun 2018 to Jun 2019
- Processed supplier invoices and payment runs for 250 active vendors

SKILLS
SAP FI, Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP), Power BI, IFRS,
month-end close, reconciliations, VAT reporting

EDUCATION
Master of Commerce (M.Com), University of Pune, India, 2018
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com), University of Pune, India, 2016

LANGUAGES
English (fluent), Hindi (native), Finnish (A2, studying)

Notice what it does. The summary uses the target title. The Indian employer gets a one-line description, because a Finnish reader has never heard of it. The oldest role gets one bullet. Skills are words, not graphics. Languages include an honest level.

Length, layout and file

Keep it to one page if you have under about ten years of relevant experience, and two pages at most otherwise. Length is not a rule anyone enforces; it is a consequence of cutting what does not help this application.

For layout, use a common font at 10 to 12 points, normal margins, and enough white space that each job is easy to find. For the file, a .docx is the safe default when the posting does not say, and a PDF is fine when it is text-based, meaning you can select and copy the text. Name the file with your name and the role, such as "Ananya-Iyer-Financial-Accountant.pdf".

How far back to go and which roles to keep is its own decision; how many jobs to put on a resume walks through it.

Check it before you send it

Three checks catch most problems:

1. The paste test. Copy all the text from your file into a plain text editor. If sections come out in the wrong order or words run together, a parser will struggle too.
2. The keyword check. Compare your resume with the job description and confirm the main skills and tools the posting names appear in your text, in the posting's spelling.
3. A slow read aloud. You will hear the typo, the repeated verb and the sentence that does not end.

Building it in japply

If you would rather not fight a word processor, you can write the same resume in japply's resume builder, which works as a guest without an account. Pick one of the 30 templates, fill in the sections above, and paste the job description you are applying to; the builder shows a live ATS score as you edit. When a bullet reads flat, you can ask the AI to improve that one bullet for 1 token (a free account comes with 25). Export as PDF or DOCX.

For the keyword check, paste your finished resume and the job posting into the free ATS checker. It runs in your browser with no signup and lists the posting's keywords your resume already matches and the ones it is missing, plus format checks. Treat the missing list as a prompt: add a term where you genuinely have the skill, and leave it out where you do not.

Common questions

Should a resume be one page?

One page suits most people with under ten years of experience, and two pages is normal for longer relevant careers. What matters more is that every line earns its place. A second page full of old, unrelated jobs hurts more than it helps.

How far back should a resume go?

Roughly the last ten to fifteen years of relevant work is the usual range. Older roles can be collapsed into a single line, such as "Earlier roles in retail, 2008 to 2012", or dropped, as long as your timeline still makes sense.

Should I put a photo on my resume?

In the US and UK, leave it off unless asked. Elsewhere in Europe habits differ by country and by employer, so follow the posting. A photo never helps a parser and takes space from your experience.

Should I write an objective or a summary?

A summary. An objective says what you want; a summary says what you offer, and you can still end it with the role you are looking for, as the example above does.

Do I need a different resume for every job?

You need a tailored version, not a new resume. Keep the master document and one base resume, then adjust the summary, the skills order and the top bullets for each posting. The tailoring guide linked above shows how.

Is "references available on request" still needed?

No. Employers assume you will provide references when asked, so the line only uses space. Keep a separate list of two or three referees ready to send.

Write the master document first, even if it takes an evening. Every resume after it becomes an editing job rather than a writing one.