The Harvard Resume Format, Accurately

There is a genre of article about the Harvard resume template that describes a format Harvard does not prescribe. The actual material is public, so it is worth reading what it says.

What is actually published

Harvard’s Mignone Center for Career Success publishes resume, CV and cover letter resources openly. What it contains:

• A written resume and cover letter guide.
• Downloadable bullet-point resume templates, in Word and Google Docs versions.
• Downloadable paragraph resume templates, in the same two formats.
• Field-specific examples, including for technology and engineering.
• Separate guidance for graduate students, doctoral candidates and extension students.

The description of a resume there is unremarkable in the best way: a brief informative document summarising your abilities, education and experience, meant to highlight your strongest assets.

Note what is absent. There is no single mandated layout, no prescribed font, no rule about margins. The service offers two structural approaches and leaves the choice to you.

The two formats, and when each fits

This is the genuinely useful distinction and it is the part most articles omit.

Bullet-point. Each role followed by bullets describing what you did and what resulted. Scans quickly, works well for commercial roles, and is what most employers expect.

Paragraph. Each role followed by a short prose block. Reads more like a narrative and suits contexts where the work is a body of research or a set of engagements that lose coherence when chopped into bullets.

Where the paragraph form earns its place: academic and research applications, some consulting and policy work, fellowship and grant applications. Where it does not: high-volume commercial hiring, where a reader skimming for evidence has to read a paragraph to find it.

If you are unsure, use bullets. See bullet points on a resume for writing them well.

The distinction that gets lost

Harvard’s service also distinguishes clearly between a resume and a CV, and the confusion between them causes real problems for people applying internationally or into academia.

The CV, in the description given, is used most frequently in academic settings and includes more credentials relevant to academia and research, such as publications, presentations and references. It is longer by design, because completeness is the point.

A resume is the opposite: brief, selective, and aimed at one role. Sending a CV where a resume was wanted looks like an inability to prioritise; sending a resume where a CV was wanted looks under-qualified. See the CV format guide and the US resume format guide.

What the branding does not buy you

Worth saying plainly, since a lot of traffic to this topic is looking for an edge.

A template published by a prestigious university is a well-made plain template. It does not signal anything to an employer, it is not recognised on sight, and using it confers no advantage beyond the quality of the layout.

What it is genuinely good for: it is free, it is plain, it uses conventional headings, and it was designed by people whose job is to get applications read. That is a better recommendation than most commercial templates can offer. The same is true of career service templates from many other institutions.

How to adapt it

University templates are built for students, which means two adjustments once you are further along.

Move education down. These templates typically give education prominence, correctly, for someone about to graduate. Once you have a few years of work, experience goes first. See education on a resume.

Drop the student-specific sections. Relevant coursework, GPA, activities and honours all earn their place early and stop earning it later. See relevant coursework and GPA on a resume.

Then do the two mechanical checks any downloaded template needs. Clear the document properties, which often still carry the original author. And export as a PDF with a real text layer rather than a flattened image, which is the requirement behind accessible PDFs and the reason a scanned file parses as blank.

The honest recommendation

Use it, or use the equivalent from any good careers service. Choose bullets unless you are in a research context. Move education below experience once you have work history. Do not expect the source to do anything for you.

And read the accompanying written guide rather than only downloading the file. The guide is where the reasoning lives, and it is more useful than the template.

Related

For the wider choice, see the resume templates guide and basic resume templates. For students specifically, see the student resume guide. For the CV distinction, see the CV format guide and the Europass CV guide.

Browse the student templates or build one free.