What Contact Information to Put on a Resume

It is the shortest section and the one with the worst failure mode. If a parser loses your email, the rest of the resume can be perfect and nobody can reply to it.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

What to include

Your name, as the first line of the page, in the same form you use on LinkedIn.

One email address that you check, written out in full: dani.okonkwo@example.com. A personal address is fine. An old university or current-employer address is not.

One phone number with the country code if you are applying across borders: +44 7700 900100.

City and country, not a street address. It answers the location question without handing a stranger where you live.

A LinkedIn URL, shortened to the custom form: linkedin.com/in/dani-okonkwo. A portfolio or GitHub link if your work lives there.

What to leave off

Date of birth, marital status and a full home address are not needed in most English-speaking markets, and in some they invite exactly the bias you would rather avoid.

Photos follow local custom. They are unusual in the US and UK and more common in parts of Europe. If you are unsure, leave it out: it is never the reason someone is shortlisted.

Several phone numbers or email addresses. One of each, the one you will answer.

Where it goes

In the body of the first page, directly under your name. Not in the document's header or footer area.

Header and footer regions are where page numbers live, and some parsers skip them. Your details look perfect on screen and can be missing from the extracted text entirely. Why your resume does not parse covers this and the other common failures.

Not inside a text box, a sidebar or an image. Each of those is a way for the text to come out detached from your name, or not at all.

How to format it

Plain text on one or two lines, separated by a simple divider: dani.okonkwo@example.com · +44 7700 900100 · London, UK.

Write the words, not icons. An envelope symbol next to your email is decoration to a person and noise to a parser. If you want labels, write them: Email, Phone.

Write links as text you can read, not as a word with a hyperlink hidden behind it. A printed or parsed resume loses the link and keeps only the word.

Check that it survived

Select all the text in your file, paste it into a plain text editor, and look at the first three lines. Your name, email and phone should be there, intact, together.

The free parse preview shows the same thing from a real parser. If your email is missing there, it is missing for the employer too.