Resume headers play an important role in your resume. A well-designed resume header isn’t just a good idea for your resume; it is a necessary part of it.
Placed at the top of your resume, the header of your resume provides an easy-to-spot place for you to include the key information that an employer or recruiter needs to get in touch with you.
What Do I Put In My Resume Header?
How To Include Your Name in Your Resume
Most importantly, your resume header should include your name, usually in a font slightly bigger than the font you’ve used for the section headings on your resume.
How To Include Your Address in Your Resume
Your resume header should also include your “general” address. In the U.S., it has become standard to include just the town or city, state, and zip code. However, your full, physical street address is sensitive information, and you should omit it from your resume. Including your street address cause privacy issues and it could also open you to discrimination.
If you are job searching in an attempt to move to a new geographic area, it is acceptable to include the city, state, and zip code of the place to which you intend to relocate. If you worry that this is misleading, you may wish to include the phrase “Relocating to City Name, State, Zip Code.” These key pieces of your address–your city, state, and zip code on your resume–can play an important role in an ATS search, so including the location you are moving to rather than the one you are moving from will be to your benefit.
How To Include Your Phone Number in Your Resume
You should also include your phone number. Ideally this will be your cell phone number, and there is no need to label it as such. Just include your full number with the area code. If you still have a landline, there is no need to include both. It is preferable that you include only a number for a phone that you know will be answered professionally every time and that the person answering your phone will take an accurate message. In other words, it is not good to include a landline if there is a possibility that your six-year-old child or your teen going through a rebellious stage might answer it. If you are still employed, never include your work number. Doing so may leave a poor impression. No future employer will be impressed by the idea that you may use your time at work to look for another job.
How To Include Your Email Address in Your Resume
Your email address is another standard way to contact you that should be in your resume header. You should form the address professionally. Your resume is not the place to use your personal address: partyguy@youremail.com. Also, avoid addresses that reveal your family status: momof5@youremail.com or your age: johnsmith1968@youremail.com. “Older” email addresses can also give away your age. For example, if you still have an @aol or @hotmail address, it is time to update it. Of course, just like with your phone number, never use your work email address.
How To Include Your LinkedIn Profile URL in Your Resume
Finally, it has also become standard to include a link to your LinkedIn profile. If you do not have a LinkedIn profile, it is time to start one. LinkedIn has grown to play a vital role in professional networking and job searching. The first thing many recruiters will do after reviewing your resume is review your LinkedIn profile. Or vice versa. It has become quite common for recruiters to use LinkedIn as a primary recruiting source, and only after they’ve found you through LinkedIn will they reach out and ask for your resume.
Make it easy for them to find you and contact you in either case. If your LinkedIn address is still the default from when you created your profile (if it still has all the random numbers and letters in it, it is almost surely the default), take five minutes to customize it. For example, I changed my LinkedIn address to linkedin.com/in/michelledumas. Before I did that, I had all sorts of random numbers at the end after my name, which looks sloppy and unprofessional on a resume.
In rare cases, if and only if, you have other social media profiles that are 100% focused on professional topics, you may include them in the header of your resume. For example, if you have a Twitter account that you use to promote your image as an expert in your industry, you may include it. If you write a blog focused solely on professional or industry topics you might include a link to this in your resume header. But, never include links to personal social media profiles or other personal websites in your resume header.
To show how you can place and format your contact information, here are two example resume headers from our New Horizons Resume Template and Project Prestige Resume Template.
Do I Put My Resume Header in the Document Header of Word?
The Word document in which you create your resume comprises different sections. The two sections you will use as you write your resume are the document body and the document headers and footers.
Most applicant tracking systems (ATS) will “read” the content that you place in the body of your document but will ignore the content you place in the document headers and footers.
Your primary resume header on the first page of your resume must be placed in the document’s body. This is important! If you put your resume header in the document header rather than the document body, there is a good chance that it will not be entered into the ATS. Imagine your resume in an ATS without your name or content information! You could send your resume in application for 100 job opportunities and never get a single response. Not because you aren’t the best candidate, but because nobody knows who you are or how to reach you.
But, don’t confuse this header section of your resume body with the resume headers and footers that you can place automatically at the top and bottom of each page of your resume.
You can format these document headers and footers to include anything you want them to include, not just text but also graphics and images. These automatically inserted resume headers and footers play an equally important role in your resume, especially when your resume is longer than one page.
When creating your resume, you can format these to include important information such as your name and phone number (in case the pages of your resume get separated) and also the page number and the total number of pages (for example, “Page 2 of 2”). Confused yet? This infographic will help.
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Video Tutorial Showing How To Work With the Resume Headers & Footers In Distinctive Resume Templates
Even for the many professional resume writers who use our resume templates to create ATS-friendly resumes for their clients, headers and footers can be confusing. If you still find yourself uncertain, watch this video.
How Should My Resume Header Look?
Your options for how to style and format your resume header are infinite. You are limited only by your imagination and creativity. But this is just one more way that using a resume template can be helpful. When you use a resume template, you just need to follow the prompts in the template and insert your information over the “dummy” text in the template.
Distinctive Resume Templates are all designed to be ATS-friendly, so you don’t even have to worry about the distinctions between “body” text and “header” text. Here are 18 more examples of resume headers that show just some of the countless header designs that work into the overall resume design. If you have decided to create your resume from scratch rather than use a template, you can use these as inspiration.
6 Resume Templates With a Left-Justified Header Design
6 Resume Templates With a Centered Header Design
3 Resume Templates With a Right-Justified Header Design
3 Resume Templates With a Full-Justified Header Design
Should I Use The Same Header on Other Career Documents?
One final pointer: Your resume plays a vital role in promoting you, your personal brand, and your unique value proposition to the world. The project a cohesive professional image, you should use a header that matches your resume on other career documents. For example, you’ll want a matching header (and footer) to appear on your professional biography and cover letter stationery too, along with any other documents that you might use in your job search. It is this need to coordinate that was behind our creation of full collections of documents. These images from our Windowpanes ATS Resume Template Collection provide a good example of this in practice.
First Page of the Resume
Matching Biography Header
