What does a header need

Your name, an email address you read, a phone number in a recognisable format, and your city. Everything else is optional and most of it is noise.

Should I put my full address

A city and country is enough for almost every application. A full street address is data you are handing to everyone who ever sees the file.

Why not use the page header

Contact details placed in a document's page header are often skipped when the text layer is pulled out of a file. The check here reads the extracted text, and so does an employer's system.

Does the checker look for a phone number

Yes. It looks for a plausibly formatted number of seven to fifteen digits and credits five points of completeness for it. It cannot verify that the number is yours.

One or two that a reader would actually open: a professional profile, a portfolio, a repository. Write them as plain text so they survive a copy and paste.

Guide · Résumé

The résumé header, and the contact details that survive

The header is four facts and one common mistake. Here is what belongs there, what does not, and why contact details in a page header sometimes vanish.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— a résumé nobody can reply to is an expensive page.

The header is the smallest part of a résumé and the only part whose failure is total. A page that impresses a reader who cannot reply to it has achieved nothing.

The four facts

Your name, as you want to be addressed. An email address you actually read, at a domain you control or a mainstream provider. A phone number in a recognisable format, with the country code if you are applying abroad. Your city, and country where relevant.

What to leave out

A full street address, which is personal data handed to everyone who touches the file, and which almost no employer needs before an offer. A second phone number nobody will ring. An email address you made at sixteen. A photograph, where the convention of the country you are applying in does not call for one.

Where it must sit on the page

In the body of the first page, as ordinary text, near the top. Not in the document's page header. A page header lives in a different part of the file, and it is commonly skipped when the text layer is extracted, which means the one section you cannot afford to lose is the one most likely to disappear. The format guide covers the other four constructions that break an extraction.

What the check reads

The ATS résumé checker gives the identity line ten points of completeness, the email address fifteen, and the phone number five. It looks for a name-shaped line in the first few lines of the document, an address that matches the shape of an email address, and a number of seven to fifteen digits that is either labelled or formatted like a telephone number. It reports that a number is plausible, and it says plainly that it cannot verify whose it is.

Two details matter in practice. A phone number written as a bare run of digits with no spaces, brackets or country code may not be recognised. And a date range such as 2018 to 2021 is deliberately excluded from being read as a phone number, so your history will not accidentally supply one.

A target role line

One line under your name naming the role you are applying for gives the page a subject. The builder keeps it as its own field, so it is one edit between applications rather than a hunt through a paragraph.

Public-sector applications ask for more

Where you are applying through a government system, follow the system. United States federal applications are the clearest example: the Department of Labor's own guidance asks for your full name, mailing address, day and evening phone numbers and home email, together with the job announcement number, title and grade (dol.gov). That is more than a private-sector header carries, and the instruction on the posting outranks any general rule.

In the builder

Personal details is the first section in the résumé builder, with the name, target role, email, phone, location and links in separate fields. Keeping them as fields rather than as a typed line is what lets each design lay the header out its own way, and it is why an imported file can fill them one by one and leave the ones it could not read empty rather than guessing.

Links that are worth a line

One or two, and only ones a reader would open: a professional profile, a portfolio, a repository with work in it. Write them as plain text rather than as a word hiding a link, because a printed page and a plain-text paste both lose the link and keep the text. A shortened link that hides its destination is worse than either.

Where your work is visual or documentary, a portfolio address earns its line more than any list of skills. The portfolio builder takes the roles and projects already in your résumé, renders them in one of 20 authored designs, and publishing claims an address of the form conxfolio.com followed by your handle.

The email address deserves ten seconds

Use one you read daily, not a university address that expires in June. Check the spam folder during an application run. Where your name is common and the address is a string of numbers, consider one that is simply your name at a mainstream provider, because a reader forwarding your résumé internally will type it from memory. None of this affects a score; all of it affects whether the reply reaches you, which is the only thing this section exists to do.

Fill in the personal details

Personal details is the first section in the editor: name, role, email, phone, location and links, each in its own field.

Open the résumé builder Check what it reads

Questions

What does a header need: Your name, an email address you read, a phone number in a recognisable format, and your city. Everything else is optional and most of it is noise.
Should I put my full address: A city and country is enough for almost every application. A full street address is data you are handing to everyone who ever sees the file.
Why not use the page header: Contact details placed in a document's page header are often skipped when the text layer is pulled out of a file. The check here reads the extracted text, and so does an employer's system.
Does the checker look for a phone number: Yes. It looks for a plausibly formatted number of seven to fifteen digits and credits five points of completeness for it. It cannot verify that the number is yours.
Should I add links: One or two that a reader would actually open: a professional profile, a portfolio, a repository. Write them as plain text so they survive a copy and paste.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.