How To Include Your Contact Information On Your Resume

Writing a great resume isn’t easy, but it’s one of the most important things to get right. Your resume is a reflection of your professional skills, abilities, and career trajectory. It’s meant to put the best version of yourself out there. And, remarkably, your resume is supposed to only be one page.

As if that wasn’t enough, you also have to think about your resume as a fluid document that you’ll be updating and constantly revising throughout your life. It’s meant to reflect who you are at the moment, not who you were several years ago when you first wrote a resume.

With all the weight your resume has to carry in only a single page, you can see how important each section of your resume is. So, let’s focus on one section: contact information. This should be an easy one for you, so it’s a great place to start.

What to Put Down for Your Resume Contact Information

• Name. It should go without saying that your name needs to be on your resume. The thing to consider is if you want it to stand on its own as a feature or you want to include it with the rest of your contact information.

• Address. Ah, to include or not to include your address on a resume. In this day and age, when almost nobody sends a resume through the U.S. postal service, why would you ever need to include your home address? The answer is, you don’t have to include it. In fact, some people prefer to keep their exact location a secret when they’re applying for jobs.

  This means that including your address is optional. Many people still prefer to add their city and state to their resume, just so the hiring manager knows you’re local. But with the boom in remote working, that doesn’t even matter anymore.

• Phone number. You should absolutely include your phone number on your resume. Most people just give their cell number as their primary number these days. Just remember that you need to answer your calls or have a professional sounding outgoing message.

• Email address. The chances are that you’re going to email your resume to the job of your dreams. They can grab your email address from the email you’ve sent them, but don’t count on it. Definitely include this in your resume contact information.

  And by the way, your email address should be something incredibly neutral and professional. If your teen email address was something silly like [email protected], it’s time to retire that address and use one that features your name.

  Try different versions of your name at various email providers until you find one that’s easy to remember, for you and your future employer.

• Website and/or Portfolio. Do you have a work website or a portfolio demonstrating the work you’ve done? If you do, this is exactly the place where you want to share that information.

• Social Media. Do you want to share your social media accounts on your resume? It depends on how you use them. A great LinkedIn profile should definitely be included.

  But what about Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, etc.? It depends on how you use your accounts. Pictures of your food or your political stance should not go to a potential employer.

  On the other hand, if you’re an influencer and want a marketing job, then your social media accounts are very relevant. Again, this decision will be yours and dependent on your social media presence and your job goals.

Note, all of your websites should have hyperlinks so the recruiter can go directly to your web pages.

How to Format Your Resume

There are a few different ways to format your resume. The format you choose will dictate where you put your contact information. We’ll give you a couple of resume samples with different formatting options below.

Examples of Contact Information on a Resume

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t matter which format you choose or prefer; the important thing is that it is easy to read, and it looks clean and professional. This can be done with the two samples we’ve included or any number of resumes.

Many job seekers prefer to title their resume with their names, making the name a larger font and bold, so it’s easy to read. If you decide to do this, it’s best only to do it with your name. The rest of your contact information can stay the standard font size.

This can be a very attractive way to format your resume, but it also takes up space. Including your skills, qualifications, and achievements is more important than having your name appear large on your resume. But for first-time job seekers or people with scant experience, it can be a nice way to fill in white space.

Your final resume needs to include your name, phone number, and email address in the contact information. These are non-negotiable and necessary to ensure the hiring manager can get in touch with you. You may also want to include your address or just your city and state, your portfolio or professional website link(s), and a social media account or two. Once your resume is formatted and ready, make sure to proofread it again or have someone else look it over, so there are no mistakes.