What a United States résumé is expected to contain

American practice splits in two. A private-sector résumé and a federal résumé are different documents with different rules, and only one of them has a published page limit.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— federal and private are not the same document.

Asking what an American résumé should look like produces two different answers depending on who is hiring, and both of them are published. The private-sector document is governed by convention and by federal guidance on what employers may ask for. The federal document has its own rules and, since 2025, its own page limit.

What the private-sector document contains

Contact details, a summary, work history in reverse chronological order, education, and skills. The Department of Labor's own résumé materials describe the contact block as sitting at the top, note that city and state are optional because most employers no longer require them, and suggest including a link to a professional profile where you have one.

Everything else about the structure is the ordinary question of what earns space, which the résumé guide covers in full.

What to leave out, and why

Federal equal-employment guidance is direct about photographs: "employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted" (eeoc.gov).

The same page says that information obtained through the pre-employment process "should be limited to those essential for determining if a person is qualified for the job", and that "information regarding race, sex, national origin, age, and religion are irrelevant in such determinations". It also notes that employers are prohibited from making pre-offer enquiries about disability.

That guidance is addressed to employers rather than to applicants, and the practical consequence for an applicant is the same: a photograph, a date of birth and a marital status do not belong on the document. This is the opposite of German convention, where the Bundesagentur für Arbeit asks for date and place of birth; the photo page sets the three traditions side by side.

The federal résumé is a different document

The Department of Labor's guidance on writing a federal résumé asks for more detail than a private-sector one would carry: the job title, starting and ending dates including month and year, the prior employer's name and address, major duties and accomplishments, and "the average number of hours worked per week or simply state 'full-time'" (dol.gov).

That page also advises applicants not to "cut out important details to try to fit your resume to one to two pages", which reflects the long-standing practice of federal résumés running well beyond the private-sector norm.

The two-page rule, and the conflict worth knowing about

That advice is now in tension with a newer rule. The Office of Personnel Management's applicant guidance states: "Resumes must be no longer than two-pages in length. The resume must address minimum qualifications and other requirements listed in the job announcement", and describes the change taking effect on USAJOBS from 27 September 2025 (opm.gov).

The same guidance lists what to keep in the two pages: contact information, relevant work experience with job title and employer, start and end dates with month and year, the hours worked per week, education, and optional details such as clearances, job-related training, language skills and publications where they are relevant. Its own advice for fitting it is to prioritise recent and relevant experience and remove what is outdated.

Both pages are official and they give different advice about length. The newer OPM rule is the one enforced by the application system, so that is the one to write to for a federal application; the DOL page remains useful for what a federal entry has to state.

Format and the extraction problem

Neither source prescribes a layout. What applies in practice is that a document usually passes through a text extractor before a person sees it, and a two-column design can be interleaved by that process. 21 of the 37 designs in the résumé builder are single-column and marked ATS-safe, meaning the layout is one column and the text still comes back out of the exported file.

You can test your own file rather than trust a layout: the ATS résumé checker reads the document on its own, uses no job description, and prints the arithmetic behind what it found. It is not an employer's applicant tracking system and predicts nothing. The format page covers what causes an extraction to fail.

Résumé or CV

In American hiring the document is a résumé, and CV is reserved for academic and research applications where publications belong on it. The word is used the other way round across much of Europe, which is a genuine source of confusion and is covered on the résumé and CV page.

References and the personal details

References are not usually listed on an American résumé. They are provided on request later in the process, and a line announcing that they are available on request is a line most readers would rather have back for evidence.

The wider point follows from the pre-employment guidance above: anything that is not evidence of qualification has a weak claim on the space. A date of birth, a marital status, a photograph and a nationality are all in that category, and leaving them off is both the convention and the safer choice for the employer reading it. What replaces them is more room for the work history, which is what the document is actually for.