What goes at the top of your résumé: contact info, done right

The top of your résumé is the smallest section on the page and the one where a mistake costs the most. If a recruiter can't reach you, nothing below it matters. It's easy to spend a weekend polishing bullet points and then send the file with an email address from 2009 and a phone number that's one digit off.

It takes five minutes to get right. Here's what I'd put up there, in order, and what I'd leave off.

The short version

Your header needs five things, and most people only need four:

1. Your name. The one you actually go by, and the one that matches your LinkedIn.
2. A phone number you'll actually pick up, with voicemail set up.
3. A professional email you check every day.
4. Your city and state. Not your street.
5. A LinkedIn URL, if the profile is in decent shape.

That's it. A portfolio or GitHub link is a sixth item only if the job is one where people look at that work.

Name

Use the name that's on your LinkedIn and the one you'd say on a phone call. Put it at the top, larger than the rest of the page, and keep it to one line. If you go by a nickname professionally, use that and be consistent. A recruiter who searches your name on LinkedIn should land on you in one try.

Skip the titles and the credentials trailing after your name unless they're the thing the job asks for. "Maria Lopez, RN" belongs on a nursing résumé. "Maria Lopez, MBA, PMP, CSM, Six Sigma Green Belt" is a lot of letters for the first line a stranger reads. List the certifications lower down, where they can be read as evidence instead of decoration.

Phone

One number. Format it so it's easy to read, like 555-123-4567. If it's a mobile, say nothing about it; no one needs the word "cell." Before you send anything, call it from another phone. Make sure the voicemail greeting says your name and isn't full. A missed recruiter call that goes to a full mailbox usually doesn't get a second try.

Email

This one is simple and gets blown more than anything else. Use a plain address built from your name: firstname.lastname at a mainstream provider.

What to avoid:

• The old fun one. Anything from high school that has a nickname, a number string, or a joke in it.
• Your current employer's address. Don't job-hunt from a work inbox. It isn't yours, and it can be read by people you'd rather not have reading it. I wrote more about that in the post on a confidential job search while employed.
• A school address that will expire. If it dies in a year, so does every reply.

If you apply to many jobs, set up a dedicated address just for the search and keep it clean. Then the replies live in one place and your personal inbox doesn't turn into a haystack.

Location: city and state, not the street

Your full street address doesn't belong on a résumé. Your résumé gets emailed, uploaded to job boards and forwarded to people you'll never meet, so treat everything on it as public. City and state is plenty for a recruiter to know whether you're local, and it keeps your home address out of a hundred databases.

Two cases are worth thinking about:

• You're applying remotely. A city and state still helps, because some remote jobs are limited to certain states for tax or legal reasons. If you want to make the point clear, you can add "Open to remote" next to it.
• You're planning to move. If you're relocating, say so in plain words, like "Relocating to Denver, CO in January." That beats leaving a location a recruiter will read as a mismatch and skip. If you're not sure you'd get to the interview stage without it, it's worth the line.

LinkedIn: include it only if it's worth clicking

Most recruiters will look you up whether you list the link or not, so the question is what they'll find. If your profile is current and matches your résumé, put the URL in. Trim it to the clean version, linkedin.com/in/yourname, by setting a custom URL in your profile settings.

If your profile is a ghost town, or tells a different story than your résumé, fix that first.

What to leave off

• A photo. American hiring mostly doesn't expect one, and a photo can invite bias before anyone reads a word. It also tends to confuse résumé parsers.
• "Resume" or "Curriculum Vitae" as a title. Everyone knows what it is. Use that line for your name.
• Date of birth, marital status, and anything about your family. None of it predicts whether you can do the job.
• A second phone number or three email addresses. Pick one of each.
• References. They don't go in the header, or really anywhere on the page until someone asks.

One setup mistake that hides your contact info

This one is a formatting trap, and I want to be careful not to overstate it.

Some people put their name and contact details into the header of the Word document, the special area above the top margin, because it looks tidy. The risk is that some parsing software reads the body of a document and skips that area, so your contact info doesn't come through into the application form. How often that happens depends on the system, and I can't tell you a percentage. What I can tell you is that it's easy to avoid: put your name and contact line in the normal body of the page, as regular text, at the top.

Do the same check with icons. A little phone symbol or envelope looks nice and adds nothing a computer can use. Write the number and the email as plain text. The simple test, same as for the rest of the page, is to paste your résumé into a plain text editor. If your name and contact info don't show up as the first lines, fix it.

Make the links real

If you send a PDF, make sure your email and LinkedIn URL are clickable. Then open the file on your phone, since that's where a lot of recruiters will see it first, and tap each one. A dead link in a header is the kind of small thing that reads as carelessness.

The shortlist

• Name, phone, email, city and state, LinkedIn. Add a portfolio link only if the work is part of the job.
• A plain email built from your name, not your employer's and not your old one.
• City and state, never the street.
• Put it in the body of the page as plain text, not in a Word header, and skip the icons.
• Leave off the photo, the birth date and anything personal.
• Test it: call the number, send the email to yourself, tap the links on your phone.

Your header is the one part of the résumé that doesn't need to be impressive. It needs to be correct, easy to find and the same everywhere you show up. Get that right and everything below it gets a fair read.

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