Resume Headers: What Goes at the Top

The header is the smallest section on a resume and the one where applications fail silently. The failure is structural rather than stylistic, and it takes thirty seconds to fix.

The rule that matters most

Put your contact details in the body of the document, not in the document header.

Word and Google Docs both have a header region, and it is the natural place to put your name. Some parsers skip headers and footers entirely, which means your document can be read into a system with your entire employment history and no phone number or email address.

Nothing tells you this happened. You simply do not hear back.

So: your name and contact line should be the first two paragraphs of the document body. If you also want your name in a running header on page two, that is fine as a supplement, never as the only instance. See the two-page resume guide.

What to include

Adaeze Okonkwo Denver, CO · (555) 014-2287 · adaeze.okonkwo@example.com · linkedin.com/in/aokonkwo

Five items and no more.

Your name. Largest text on the page. The name you use professionally, matching what your employers and any background check will confirm. No nickname in quotation marks.

City and state. Enough for location filtering, which is what it is for.

One phone number. Formatted normally, the one you will actually answer.

One email address. Based on your name, from a mainstream provider.

One link, if it earns its place.

What to leave out

A full street address. A convention from the era of posted applications. It now reads as an unnecessary disclosure and adds two lines.

Multiple phone numbers. Which one should they ring? Pick one.

Your work email. Applying from a current employer’s address is a poor signal on several levels, and access to it can disappear.

Date of birth, age, marital status, nationality, gender or a photo. These are the characteristics the EEOC identifies as prohibited bases for employment decisions, so US employers are trained to avoid collecting them. Their presence creates a problem rather than an impression. See the US resume format guide.

Social media that is not professional. Personal accounts do not belong.

A quotation or personal motto. See motivational quotes at work.

The email address matters more than people think

It is read before anything else you have written.

Use firstname.lastname or a close variant at a mainstream provider. Avoid an address made in school, a nickname, a birth year, or anything with a joke in it. Also avoid an address from an obsolete provider, which reads as dated in a way that is unfair and real.

Set up a plain one if you need to. It takes two minutes and you will use it for a decade.

Links, only if they earn it

One link maximum for most people, two if you are in a field where a portfolio is expected.

Worth including: a complete and current professional profile, a portfolio in a design or creative field, a code repository with real work in it, a personal site with substantive writing.

Not worth including: an empty or half-finished profile, a repository of tutorial forks, a personal blog with two posts from four years ago.

The reason to be strict: a reader who follows a link and finds nothing has learned something worse than if you had not offered it. See turning a LinkedIn profile into a resume for the profile side.

Write links as plain readable text rather than hiding them behind a shortener, and make sure they are short enough to type from a printed page.

Formatting the block

Plain text. Not in a text box, not in a shape, not part of an image. Text inside containers may not extract, and a name rendered as a graphic extracts as nothing, which is the same problem Section508.gov describes for accessible PDFs.

Name at around 18 to 22 point, bold. Contact line at body size.

One line for contact details, separated by dots or pipes, rather than four stacked lines. It saves three lines of vertical space at the top of the page, which is the most valuable space you have.

No icons. A phone icon instead of the word phone extracts as nothing and gains nothing.

Adding a headline

The one legitimate addition to the block: a single line stating your role and specialism, under your name.

Adaeze Okonkwo Denver, CO · (555) 014-2287 · adaeze.okonkwo@example.com Operations Manager · Multi-site distribution · 6 years, 4 sites, 180 staff

That orients a reader immediately. See the resume headline guide.

In licensed fields, a credential line goes here too, since it is the first filter.

A thirty-second check

1. Are your details in the body, not the document header?
2. Is your email based on your name, at a mainstream provider?
3. Is your address reduced to city and state?
4. Does every link you include actually work and contain something?
5. Is any of it inside a text box or an image?

Related

For what follows the header, see the resume headline guide and resume summary examples. For the whole structure, see the resume sections guide and the resume format guide. For parsing, see ATS resume templates.

Browse the ATS-friendly templates or build one free.