16 Top Resume Tips to Help You Land a Job in 2026

Key takeaways

• Top resume tips include using a simple, scannable design, formatting your resume to be ATS-ready, and adding a professional summary or objective to highlight your qualifications.

• Three general resume tips are focusing on concrete achievements with strong action words, translating technical language into plain terms, and tailoring your experience and skills to match the job descriptions.

• You can make your resume stand out by highlighting unique, relevant skills, showcasing academic awards or achievements, and using generative AI tools to help tailor your resume for each application.

A resume is your opportunity to showcase your work experience, qualifications, and skill set to potential employers, and these 16 tips can help you build one that stands out.

If you're ready to strengthen your resume-writing skills, consider enrolling in the University of Maryland, College Park's Interviewing and Resume Writing in English Specialization to build effective resumes and prepare for interviews.

Resume tips: How to format your resume

A resume’s format is one of its most important and overlooked features. In this section, you'll explore some top resume tips for ensuring your resume’s formatting stays impactful.

1. Keep the design simple and scannable

Although it might be tempting to personalize your resume with eye-catching graphics and unusual formatting, simpler designs are almost always better.

The reason is straightforward: hiring managers only scan a resume for a handful of seconds before moving on to another one, and a simpler design makes it easier for them to find the most important information.

To make your resume and cover letter more impactful, researchers suggest job seekers format them in a simple manner, with clearly marked sections and job titles in bold. They also recommend using clear, easy-to-read fonts (like Times New Roman) and bulleted descriptions below your job titles with some white space around them [1].

2. Make it ATS-ready

You should also make sure that your resume is easily read by the applicant tracking systems (ATS) that many organizations use. These automated systems scan resumes by converting them into plain text so that they can filter and organize applications by factors like relevant experience, education level, and skill level. By converting resumes to plain text, though, the ATS can cause problems for those who rely heavily on graphic elements.

To make your resume ATS-ready, do the following:

• Keep a simple design with clearly marked sections.

• Use common fonts like Times New Roman or Helvetica.

• Submit your resume as a Word document or PDF.

• Include relevant resume keywords from the job description in your work experience, skills, and professional summary sections. Make sure to only use the keywords in a context that makes sense. Keyword stuffing can sometimes lead to your resume being thrown out.

3. Consider a professional summary or objective

A professional summary gives you the space to outline your professional experience, key qualifications, and skills to hiring managers, while a resume objective focuses on your career goals. These sections can be a good way to give recruiters, who are skimming your resume, an easy-to-read overview of your career and job preparedness.

4. Use a professional email address

Your email is your digital calling card, inviting potential employers to reach out to you online. As a result, it’s crucial to have an email address that is both professional and easy to remember.

To create a professional email address, use a commonly accepted email provider, such as Gmail, and make an address using your name. If your full name is already taken as an email address, use a variation that isn’t. For instance, you might put your last name before your first name or separate your first and last name with a period, such as “abraham.lincoln@coursera.org.”

5. Omit a references section

In the past, it was common to include a references section on your resume, but today that isn’t required. The same goes for the phrase “references available upon request”; it’s not necessary for your resume.

The reality is that most hiring managers in this step of the hiring process don’t have the time to call any references, so a section devoted to them takes up way too much space. Instead, use the extra space to flesh out more relevant information, such as your career experience.

If a hiring manager wants you to send over references, they'll likely just ask you before or after your interview.

Resume building tips: How to list work experience

The work experience section of your resume is where you’ll highlight your relevant work experience. Follow the guidelines below to create an impactful overview of your work experience.

6. Put your experience in reverse chronological order

The most relevant work experience to many employers is your most recent work experience. To highlight your most recent work, list your jobs in reverse chronological order on your resume. That means putting your most recent at the top of your resume and the least recent at the bottom. This career chronology helps recruiters notice the positions you held most recently and see how those positions prepared you for the job.

Learn more: Chronological Resume Guide: Template and Tips

7. Tailor bullet points to the jobs you're applying for

The bullet points in your work experience section are meant to elaborate on the duties you performed in your previous positions. Rather than including every past responsibility, it’s wiser to tailor the duties you include in your work experience to match the relevant skills and experience with those of the job description.

This way, you’ll highlight the key responsibilities that overlap with the advertised position, effectively demonstrating your suitability for the position.

8. Translate technical language into plain language

If you're in a specialized industry, chances are that you have a wealth of technical knowledge that the general population doesn’t know. While this will undoubtedly improve your capacity to do specific tasks, it can also obscure your abilities to hiring managers who don’t have the same expertise.

As a result, it’s helpful to translate your technical expertise into plain language so that recruiters and hiring managers can more clearly understand your prior experience. You can keep your prior experience easy to follow by focusing on the impact of your work rather than the nuts and bolts of it.

For example, if you created a digital project management system that required technical knowledge of databases that most don’t understand, then you might instead highlight the fact that hundreds of employees used the system at your former workplace.

That said, if a job description explicitly asks for a specific technical or transferable skill, make sure to highlight it in both your resume and cover letter. This is the kind of knowledge that a hiring manager is specifically looking for, even if they don’t always understand what it is in practice.

9. Focus on concrete achievements

At its core, work is about getting the job done. Your daily actions at work accumulate into concrete outcomes that hopefully create your employer's desired impact.

To help recruiters understand how you made an impact at your previous jobs, you should emphasize the concrete goals you achieved. For example, while noting they made daily calls to potential clients, a salesperson might also state that their efforts led to a "150 percent increase in total revenue for the company."

10. Use action words

Resume action words are verbs that describe your duties and responsibilities with impactful language. As you're writing your resume, make sure to use strong action verbs to help readers clearly understand your previous work experience.

For example, rather than simply saying that you “led” a team of four, you might instead say that you “managed” them. Active language like this allows recruiters to see your work more clearly and imagine you in the advertised role.

Bonus resume tip: Use GenAI to tailor (or draft) your resume

Having trouble finding the right words to describe your work experience in your resume or cover letter? Consider using generative AI to write your resume.

Resume writing tips: How to list your education

Your educational experience can prove your dedication to a particular field of study and underscore your academic achievements. In this section, you'll learn how to use the education section of your resume to emphasize your skill set and qualifications.

11. Put your experience before education (unless you’re a student)

If you have some prior work experience, you should put your education section below your work experience. Recent graduates and current students, however, should put their education above their work experience section. Putting their educational background near the top of their resumes allows graduates and students to highlight their ongoing training when work experience is lacking.

If you’re a student, consider emphasizing your skill set by adding a “relevant courses” section to your education section, where you can put a handful of courses you’ve taken that prepared you for the position.

Read more: How to Make a Resume for Your First Job (+ Template)

12. Highlight awards or achievements

If you've received any unique academic awards or reached significant achievements during your time in school, then you might consider including them in the education section of your resume. These include Latin honors, scholarships, awards, or any other notable honors you may have received during your time in school.

Such achievements demonstrate not only your hard work and dedication to your field of study but also the recognition from others you've received.

13. Don’t put your GPA (usually)

Unless your employer specifically asks for it, you don’t need to include your GPA on your resume. Most employers are more interested in the fact that you've met the educational requirements for the position than in what your grades were.

That said, if you did exceptionally well, including your GPA could be a good way to catch an employer’s attention. For example, a 3.9 or 4.0 GPA on your resume can demonstrate your hard work and dedication. In effect, feel free to omit or include your GPA on your resume, but know that it isn’t usually expected.

How to highlight your skills on your resume

The skills section of your resume is where you’ll put all the relevant skills you possess that make you a great candidate for the job. In this section, you’ll learn three tips to help you confidently craft this impactful section.

14. Include both technical skills and workplace skills

The skills section of your resume should include both your technical (“hard”) skills and your workplace (“soft”) skills. While many people mistakenly believe that only their technical skills are valuable to employers, people skills are also incredibly important. Make sure to include both on your resume.

Technical skills are all the skills that you use for accomplishing technical tasks, such as computer programming or bookkeeping. Workplace skills, meanwhile, are all the skills that you use to do your job well, such as teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking.

Learn more about the difference between technical skills and workplace skills.

15. Tailor skills to the job description

You likely possess a wide range of skills that are not immediately relevant to the jobs you’re applying for. Rather than including all of those skills, it’s wiser to include only those that are relevant to the position.

You can find these skills by going through the job description and identifying the technical, people, and transferable skills the hiring manager has emphasized. Afterward, go through the list of skills and determine which ones you possess. Include those in the skill section of your resume. This will help hiring managers (and the ATS) see that you’re a suitable match for the job.

16. Strategically highlight your unique (but still relevant) skills

In some cases, you may possess unique skills that would be helpful to the position but are not cited in the job description. If you possess any such unique skills, then it can be a good idea to include them in the skills section of your resume.

Examples of unique skills include fluency in a foreign language and variants of skills relevant to the position, such as being competent in Java and C# when a position only asks for the ability to code in Python.

Explore our free career resources

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