Resume Order: The Complete Guide to Structuring Your Resume for Success

Your resume serves one purpose—to grab the hiring manager’s attention. When you’re creating this document, there are many things to consider. However, one of your top priorities needs to be structure.

Getting the resume order right from the start is a big deal. Put simply, it shows the hiring manager you know what you’re doing.

In the following guide, we’ll be looking at the standard resume order, other options, and how to make yours easy to read. Let’s dive into it.

How important is the resume order?

First things first, we need to talk about why your resume order matters. You might think the structure is unimportant as long as all the information is there. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is the standard resume order?

To begin with, let’s talk about the standard resume order. This is the way to go when you’re using the reverse chronological format.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the layout:

1. Header

Your Resume Header includes your basic contact details—your full name, job title, location, email address, and phone number. You can also add extras, such as a link to your LinkedIn page here.

2. Summary or objective

The next section in the standard resume order is either your Resume Summary or your Objective Statement. A Professional Summary is a short paragraph detailing your top achievements and career moments. An Objective, on the other hand, covers what your career goals are and how this role aligns with them.

3. Work experience

Next, you should add your work experience. As the name suggests, this covers any relevant roles you’ve held. You should only go back 10-15 years in the past and use the reverse chronological order.

4. Education

Your Education section covers your schooling—i.e. your high school and college education. You may also choose to list your training and certificates in this space. However, some candidates choose to create an entirely separate Certifications section, instead—the choice is yours.

5. Skills

When you’ve covered all of the above, it’s time to add your Skills section. While you’ll have a selection of hard skills and soft skills under your belt, you don’t need to list both here. Instead, focus on including your hard skills as bullet points. You can then weave your soft skills throughout the rest of your resume.

6. Optional sections

Once you’ve added the above sections in that order, you have the option to slide in a few more. We’ve already mentioned including a dedicated Certifications section. However, you may also choose to list a Volunteer Work section or a space dedicated to your hobbies and interests.

What about different resume order options?

The golden rule for most applicants is to use the above resume order. However, rules are sometimes made to be broken. There are two other resume orders to consider. Let’s take a look at them.

Skills-based resume order

Want to highlight your skills over your work experience? Using a skills-based or functional resume format is the answer. The resume order is slightly different from the standard layout.

Here’s how it looks:

1. Header
2. Summary or Objective
3. Skills
4. Work Experience
5. Education
6. Additional sections

As you can see, this approach swaps the Skills and Work Experience sections. You’ll also find that a skills-based resume groups previous work positions by skill sets.

Combination resume order

On the other hand, you might choose to use a combination resume format. This layout can either use the standard resume order or the skills-based layout as it combines the best of both worlds.

How to choose the right resume order for your application

For most applicants, we strongly recommend using the traditional resume order. But when should you mix things up? Here are three times when it could be smart to use a different order.

New graduates

If you’ve recently graduated, you probably still lack work experience in your industry. In this scenario, you want to emphasize your skills and education over your prior jobs. Using a functional resume format is the answer. That means switching the Skills and Work Experience sections in your resume order.

Career changers

Trying your hand at something new? Once again, you probably don’t have the right work experience for the vacancy. Using either a skills-based or combination format could help gain the reader’s attention. This approach means you can highlight transferable skills and any relevant experience you have.

Technical professionals

Do you work in a highly technical field? Chances are, the hiring manager cares more about your skill set than your work experience. In that case, you might want to use a different resume order. Opt for the functional format as we have described above.

The best resume order for Applicant Tracking Systems

There’s a lot of hype surrounding Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and you shouldn’t believe everything you hear. While “the bots” won’t automatically reject your resume, you still need to use the best format for this software. We recommend using the traditional resume format for this reason.

Here are some tips that will help you make your resume ATS-friendly:

FAQs about resume order

Conclusion

Getting your resume order right is more important than you might think. If you want to impress the hiring manager and walk effortlessly past the ATS software, we recommend using a standard layout. You can rejig the sections if you want to show off your skills over your experience level. This works well for career changers, recent graduates, and professionals with gaps in their resume.