Resume examples

Good resume examples show you what a hiring manager in your field expects to read: the job title, the skills the posting asks for, the industry vocabulary and the order of the sections. Use them as a guide for writing your own resume, not as text to copy.

1. Pick the closest example to the job you want, even if the title is different: a server, a barista and a host share almost every section.
2. Keep the structure and replace every line with your own background: your employers, your duties, your results.
3. Add numbers wherever you can: customers served per shift, tickets closed per week, people trained, budget managed.
4. Reuse the words of the job posting in your title, summary and skills. Recruiters and applicant tracking systems (ATS) look for them.

The figures in each example are made up: put in yours. Anything on your resume can come up in the interview.

• A complete resume, laid out with one of Kandiq's real resume templates.
• What recruiters look for first in that job: licenses, availability, tools, years of experience.
• A summary written for your situation: first job, experienced, or changing careers.
• Duties and skills worth highlighting, with bullet points you can adapt, and the mistakes to avoid.

The grid above sorts them by situation and by job: a nurse resume built around license and unit experience, a high school student resume for a first part-time job, and a resume with no work experience for adults starting out. New examples are added with each release.

Most resumes in the United States follow the same reverse-chronological order. What changes from one job to the next is what you put forward in each section.

1. Contact information: full name, phone number, professional email, city and state (Columbus, OH), and your LinkedIn URL if it is up to date.
2. A headline with the job title you are targeting, under your name.
3. A summary of two or three sentences: what you do, what you are good at, what you want next. The resume summary guide has examples for every level.
4. Work experience, most recent first: employer, city, dates, and three to five bullet points that start with an action verb.
5. Education: degree, school, graduation year. Put it above experience if you are still in school or just graduated.
6. Skills: the tools and abilities the posting names, not a list of adjectives. See skills for a resume.
7. Certifications and licenses when the job requires them: RN license, CPR, forklift, CompTIA.

A hiring manager does not scan a retail resume the way they scan a nursing one. The table sums up what should be readable first in each field.

Each line follows the same rule: an action, a context, a result. The companies and numbers below are fictional.

An example gives you the content: what to write for a given job. A template gives you the form: layout, font, color. Write from an example, then pick a look among the resume templates. You can switch templates at any time without retyping, and each thumbnail says whether the layout passes every ATS check.

1. Import your current resume from a PDF, a Word file or your LinkedIn profile's PDF export, or start from a blank page.
2. Write each section with the example open: paste the job posting, and the editor suggests bullet points in its words. It never invents a number, and you choose what stays.
3. Test it with the ATS checker: a score out of 100, check by check, with the reason behind every lost point.
4. Download your resume as a PDF, or as a Word file if the employer asks, and add a cover letter: the cover letter examples follow the same method.

Creating, importing and editing your resume, and checking its score, cost nothing. Downloads are part of Kandiq Pro, at $2.99 for the first week, then $19.99 a month, or $29.97 every three months ($9.99 a month). The full method is in the resume guide, and the builder is on the resume builder page.