What belongs in each resume section

Your resume has 13 sections plus a header block, and every one of them is optional except the ones your score reads. This article is the reference for what belongs in each.

Sections are edited in the Details tab, one at a time, from the list down the left.

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Your header

Your header is not a section you can move or rename, and it is the first thing anyone reads. It holds your name, a professional headline, email, phone, website, and location.

The website field takes a link plus separate link text, so you can show portfolio.example.com instead of the full URL.

Five of these fields are scored: name, headline, email, phone, and location.

Profiles

Profiles hold LinkedIn, GitHub, a portfolio, and anything else with a handle. Each entry takes a network, your handle, and an optional URL, and a switch controls whether they render as clickable links or as plain text.

Profiles are pinned to the top of your section order and cannot be dragged elsewhere.

Summary

One professional summary, written as a paragraph. The field takes up to 5,000 characters, though the content score wants it between 150 and 800.

Write it in the third person, because first person pronouns are a scored issue.

Experience

Experience is the heaviest section in your score, and the one worth the most attention.

Each role holds a company, position, location, start and end dates, a Current Position switch, an optional paragraph summary, and a list of achievements.

Achievements are the bullets. You can add up to 30 per role, and the score wants at least 3 of them, each between 40 and 250 characters and ideally carrying a number.

Education

Each entry holds an institution, location, dates, a grade, and a minor or concentration, plus a courses list of up to 30.

Two of the fields get mixed up more than any others, so to be explicit:

• Degree is the level. Bachelor of Science, MBA, Diploma.
• Area of Study is the field. Mechanical Engineering, History.

The server requires both an institution and a degree on every education entry, so an entry missing either one cannot be saved.

Skills

Skills are stored as groups, each with a name and a list of keywords. You get up to 30 groups, up to 100 keywords in a group, and 100 characters for any single name or keyword.

Group names are worth using properly (Languages, Frameworks, Certifications) because several templates render the group name alongside its keywords, and because a group with no keywords in it only scores half.

Projects

Projects hold a name, title, location, dates, a summary, and highlights. Highlights work exactly like experience bullets, including the 3 bullet target.

The server requires both a name and a title on every project.

Volunteer

Volunteer entries hold an organization, position, dates, a summary, and highlights, and they are scored the same way as projects for bullet count and bullet quality.

Awards

Awards hold an awarder, title, date, and a summary. The awarder field also takes a domain, so the issuing organization's logo can be shown where the template supports it.

Certificates

Certificates hold an issuer, name, date, and a URL. They are the one entry type with no summary field, by design, because a certificate is a fact rather than a paragraph.

Publications

Publications hold a publisher, name, release date, and a summary.

Languages

A language and a fluency level per row, both up to 100 characters. All 6 templates render them.

Interests

An interest name plus optional details. Details are comma separated and render as a keyword list, so Photography with film, darkroom printing reads the way you would expect.

References

A name plus a details field of up to 500 characters. The details field is multi-line, so a title, a company, and a contact line all fit inside it.

If you are using "References available on request", that is a line in your summary, not a section.

Which sections affect your score

Only 5 count toward your completion score: your header fields, summary, experience, education, and skills. The other 9 sections contribute nothing to it.

They still matter. Projects and volunteer entries are read by several content quality checks, and every section is rendered in your export. But if you fill in Certificates and watch your score stay put, that is the score working as designed. The full breakdown is in Your resume score explained.

Limits worth knowing before you hit them

A few fields accept more characters in the editor than the server stores, so a very long paste is the one thing that can bounce a save:

Keep entry summaries under 3,000 characters and any single bullet under 1,000 and you will never meet these limits. A bullet anywhere near 1,000 characters is a paragraph wearing a bullet, and the content score will say so.