How Many Bullet Points Should You Use Per Job on a Resume?

No. A second page buys you more roles, not more lines per role. The taper stays the same: 5 or 6 bullets on the most relevant job, 3 or 4 in the middle, 0 to 2 on the oldest entries. Aim for 18 to 28 bullets in total across two pages. Two things matter more than the count. Put your most important content in the top third of page one, because that is what gets read first. And fill at least two-thirds of page two — a second page with four lines on it looks like a mistake and should be cut back to one page instead. Go to two pages when you have roughly 10 or more years of relevant history, when you are applying in a field that expects detail (engineering, healthcare, government contracting), or when a single page would mean dropping a job that matters. Federal resumes through USAJOBS and academic CVs run longer again and follow their own conventions.

You can, but check what it is built from. Many downloadable templates put the experience section inside a table or a text box, and some parsers read those out of order or skip them. The safest build is a single-column layout with plain paragraphs and real bullet lists. If you want a sidebar, keep it for skills, certifications or languages — content that still makes sense if it lands at the bottom of the parsed text. Keep job titles, employers, dates and bullets in the main column. Skip icons for phone and email. They often render as a missing-glyph box, and the parser gains nothing from them. A line of plain text with your city, phone number and email reads perfectly well. The quick test: open your file, select all, copy, and paste into a plain-text editor. If the order scrambles or content disappears, rebuild the section in plain paragraphs.

In the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, no. Resumes there are expected without a photo, and some employers' recruiting policies have screeners discard or anonymise files that include one to reduce bias exposure. In much of continental Europe — Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and several neighbouring countries — a headshot on a CV is still common, and some employers expect one. Norms also differ across parts of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. If you are applying outside the US, check the convention for that country and, where you can, what the specific employer asks for. For acting, modelling, on-camera presenting and some hospitality roles, headshots are part of the application everywhere, usually as a separate file rather than embedded in the resume. Where a photo is not expected, the space is better spent on two more bullets.

Follow the posting. If it names a format, use that one; if it lists accepted types, pick from the list. When nothing is specified, .docx is the safer default for online application forms, because every tracking system parses it and the text stays selectable. PDF is the better choice when a human will open the file directly — an email to a hiring manager, a referral, a networking introduction — because the layout cannot shift between machines. If you send PDF, export it from your word processor rather than printing to image or scanning. A scanned or flattened PDF has no selectable text and parses as empty. Never send .pages, .odt, .txt or a Google Docs share link unless asked. Name the file Firstname-Lastname-Resume with no spaces or version numbers.

Yes, and it should. Equal blocks down the page suggest you have not decided what matters. A reader scanning the left edge uses block depth as a signal: the deepest block is the role you want them to study. What must stay consistent is structure, not length. Same order of title, employer, location and dates. Same date format. Same bullet character. Same tense — past tense for finished roles, present for the current one. Same indentation. The one layout to avoid is a one-bullet job sitting between two six-bullet jobs. If a role only justifies one line, drop the bullet and fold the detail into the title line, or group that role with others under an "Earlier roles" heading.

One or two lines, roughly 14 to 24 words. Two lines is fine and often necessary when a bullet carries both the task and the number. Three lines is too long — split it or cut the weaker half. Start with an action verb, name the task, then give the scope in the units the role actually uses: patients per shift, tickets per week, square feet, accounts, headcount, invoices, route miles, close days. Avoid starting bullets with "Responsible for" — it costs two words and delays the verb. > **Trimming a three-line bullet** > - Before: Was responsible for managing the full month-end close process for multiple entities, including journal entries, reconciliations, and reporting to the finance director, as well as supporting the annual audit each year > - After: Closed month-end for 4 entities in 5 business days in NetSuite, and prepared the reconciliation pack for the annual audit If two bullets describe the same work from different angles, merge them. That usually saves a line and makes the remaining bullet stronger.

Education usually does not. For most applicants it is one line per qualification: degree, institution, location, graduation year. Add one or two bullets only if the detail does work for you — a relevant thesis, a GPA an employer asks for, a licence earned through the programme, or honours. Recent graduates can go to three or four bullets covering relevant coursework, a capstone project or a leadership role, because there is less work history to carry the page. Projects take 2 to 3 bullets each, written the same way as experience bullets: what you built, what you built it with, and the outcome or scale. Two or three projects is plenty. Skills work better as grouped lines than as a bulleted list — for example a line for software, a line for certifications, a line for languages. That packs more terms into fewer lines, which keeps room for the experience section where the evidence lives.