How do you write a resume or CV, step by step?

How to write a resume or CV: the short answer

Every career office quoted here gives the same skeleton: contact details at the top, a short summary where the country uses one, education and experience each in reverse chronological order, and skills. What differs is the order of education and experience, the length and the personal details, depending on the country and your career stage. Harvard says to order the headings by importance to the job.

Resume (US), CV (UK, Europe) and özgeçmiş (Turkey) name the same job document here. The page on CV versus resume covers the difference and the long academic CV, which this page does not.

The eight steps in one list

1. Collect your facts in a plain list before you write a sentence.
2. Put your contact details at the top, in the body of the page.
3. Write a short summary if the country or the employer expects one.
4. Order education and experience, newest first, with the stronger section on top.
5. Write each experience bullet as an action, how you did it and what came of it.
6. List skills and languages with their levels in words.
7. Cut the document to the length the country and your career stage call for.
8. Proofread, save as PDF unless the posting says otherwise, and check the file.

What to do in the first minute

Open a blank document and write one line for each job, internship, project and course: employer or school, your title, the dates, and one thing you did or made. Do not format anything yet. MIT's career office suggests starting with a blank page rather than a template, because templates become increasingly difficult to edit. If you already have a draft, drop it into the free checker at the top of this page instead: it runs in your browser, needs no account and tells you what to fix first.

Step by step: from a blank page to a finished file

Each step names its source. Pages were read on 8 October 2026; see Sources.

Step 1: collect facts before you write a sentence

List every job, internship, project and period of volunteering with employer, title, dates, what you did and what came of it, plus your schools and qualifications. MIT tells students to include internships, leadership, class projects and competitions, not only jobs. Harvard's page on AI and resumes sets the test: be able to speak to every line of your resume if asked in an interview. A fact you cannot state out loud does not belong on the page.

Step 2: contact details first, in the body of the page

Harvard lists missing contact information among five resume mistakes to avoid. The National Careers Service asks for your name, phone number, email and professional network links such as LinkedIn; TED University, a Turkish university, asks for a professional-sounding email address. Put these lines in the body of the page: Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system (ATS), lists a name and contact details in the header, footer or a text box among the causes of an unsuccessful resume parse.

Step 3: a short summary, if the country expects one

Prospects, the UK graduate careers service, puts a personal statement after the contact details: a concise overview of your attributes and career goals. The National Careers Service calls it an introduction, Europass an About me section and TED University a career objective. Harvard's headings start at Education, with no summary. So a summary is expected in the UK, Europe and Turkey and optional in the US. Two or three plain sentences do: your field, your strongest evidence and what you want. Prospects warns against phrases such as team player with nothing behind them.

Step 4: education and experience, newest first

The National Careers Service puts education after the introduction if you are early in your career and after your work history if you are highly experienced. TED University gives new graduates the same advice, and says that once you have worked, experience is the most important section: give the latest job the most room and list the jobs that gave you skills for this role, not every job. Europass says to list the most recent first and explain long gaps; Prospects counts an unexplained gap among common mistakes.

Step 5: write each bullet as an action with a result

MIT advises strong action verbs such as built, managed or wrote, accomplishments rather than duties, and how you did the work, not only what you did. Harvard asks for fact-based bullets, quantified and qualified where you can, in the active voice. The National Careers Service suggests two to three lines per role using the STAR method (situation, task, action, result). Harvard, MIT and TED University all say to avoid the first person. The bullets below are illustrations; use your own facts and numbers, or none.

Step 6: skills and languages, with levels in words

Name tools and methods as the posting spells them and give a level in words. TED University advises against vague adjectives such as good or average for a language; it asks for the level per skill, such as speaking: intermediate, and for an explanation of what a CEFR level like C1 or A2 means. The page on skills for a resume covers choosing and proving skills.

Step 7: cut to the right length

Europass advises against a full detailed history: keep the facts that match the job. MIT says to tailor by choosing the experiences that match the position. For layout, MIT asks for a conservative font no smaller than 10 point and margins of at least half an inch; the National Careers Service suggests size 11 or bigger. Use the same spacing, bold and capitals for every heading, as Harvard asks.

Step 8: proofread, save and check

Spelling and grammar errors come first on Harvard's list of mistakes to avoid. Ask someone to read it. Send the format the posting asks for; Greenhouse tells candidates to upload a PDF and, if an upload fails, to re-save it as a PDF and reduce the file size. Harvard asks you to check that formatting survives the PDF conversion. After uploading, read the fields the form filled in; Greenhouse says parsing can make mistakes.

Which section comes first? The order by country and career stage

Each row is one source's own order. Pick the one that fits your country and put your strongest section first.

How long a resume or CV should be

None of these pages says that length changes how an ATS reads a file; the limit Greenhouse documents is file size, 2.5 MB.

What to leave out

• First person. Harvard, MIT and TED University all say to avoid I, me and my.
• Anything that is not about the job: past salary and salary expectations (MIT; TED University), your reason for leaving a job and unexplained abbreviations (TED University).
• Exaggeration. Prospects lists lying or exaggerating among common mistakes, and TED University warns against overstated skills and language levels.
• Empty claims. Prospects warns against 'team player' with no evidence behind it; TED University points out that hobbies such as reading or travelling say nothing, while captaining a university basketball team does.
• Graphics. Prospects says an ATS cannot read images, logos or graphics, so use text only; Greenhouse lists graphics, photos and word art among causes of a failed parse.

Where the career offices disagree

Check the finished file before you send it

The free CV checker at the top of this page reads a PDF, DOCX or TXT of up to 5 MB, or pasted text, in your browser. It needs no account, costs no credits and calls no language model, so the same text gets the same findings. Several rules match the advice above:

• A missing email is an error and a missing phone is a note, in line with the contact-details step.
• Wording rules flag buzzwords, first person, 'responsible for', long bullets and more than six bullets in a role.
• Layout: more than one column, picture pages, text boxes, tables and header text.

It does not read a job posting, run any employer's parser or judge whether your facts are right. The ATS CV checker page lists every check and how the score is made.

How CitedCV fits

CitedCV is one way to do steps 1 to 8. It writes a CV only from facts you give it, by form, an uploaded CV or interview answers. Each line carries the ids of the facts it was written from, a deterministic check compares numbers and names with those facts, and a line it cannot verify is dropped. When something is missing it asks. A new account starts with 6 free credits, enough for a quick draft of a general CV (6 credits).

The section order follows the region you choose: for the US it runs summary, experience, education, skills; for Turkey personal details, summary, education, experience, languages, skills. Every template is single column with standard headings, no tables and no header or footer content, and exports are PDF, DOCX or TXT. The what-is-a-CitedCV page explains the method.

Who this page is not for

• You are writing an academic CV for a faculty post, a grant or a fellowship. MIT and Illinois describe a longer document; see the CV versus resume page and your institution's guide.
• The posting names a template, a length or a form. Follow it; it overrides every convention here.

Other ways to write one, and whom each fits

Limits, stated plainly

• The pages were read on 8 October 2026 and change over time. The Kariyer.net page was last updated in 2017 and the TED University guide carries no date.
• The sources are career services written mostly for students and graduates. They agree on the skeleton, not on every detail.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, Create a strong resumecareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/create-a-strong-resume/
2. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, AI for resumes and cover letterscareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/ai-resumes-and-cover-letters/
3. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, Bullet point resume templatecareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/bullet-point-resume-template/
4. MIT Career Advising & Professional Development, Resumescapd.mit.edu/resources/resumes/
5. University of Illinois Career Center, Resume vs. Curriculum Vitae (CV)careercenter.illinois.edu/cvresume
6. Prospects, How to write a CVwww.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/cvs-and-cover-letters/how-to-write-a-cv
7. National Careers Service, CV sectionsnationalcareers.service.gov.uk/careers-advice/cv-sections
8. Europass, Create your Europass CVeuropass.europa.eu/en/create-europass-cv
9. Europass, About Europasseuropass.europa.eu/en/about-europass
10. TED Üniversitesi Kariyer Merkezi, Özgeçmiş (CV) nedir?career.tedu.edu.tr/sites/default/files/docs/staj_kitapcik_0-1_1.pdf
11. Kariyer.net, CV hazırlarken en çok sorulan sorularwww.kariyer.net/kariyer-rehberi/cv-hazirlarken-en-cok-sorulan-sorular/
12. İŞKUR, Özgeçmiş düzenleme bölümünü nasıl doldurabilirim?www.iskur.gov.tr/sikca-sorulan-sorular/is-arayan/ozgecmis-duzenleme-bolumunu-nasil-doldurabilirim/
13. Greenhouse Support, Unsuccessful resume parsesupport.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/200989175-Unsuccessful-resume-parse
14. Greenhouse Support, MyGreenhouse FAQ for Candidatessupport.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/43418495049499-MyGreenhouse-FAQ-for-Candidates