The Resume Header, Done Right

A resume header needs five things: your name, one professional email address, one phone number, your city and state or region, and one or two relevant links. It sits in the normal body of the document, not in a header or footer element, and it takes three or four lines. Everything else people put up there — photos, full street addresses, elaborate icon rows — either wastes the most prominent space on the page or actively causes problems.

The five things, one at a time

Your name. The largest text on the page, and the only place a bigger font is justified. Use the name you want to be called and be consistent with it across your resume, your applications, and your professional profiles — a reader who finds “Kate Nguyen” on a resume and “Katherine Nguyen” on LinkedIn has to do a small piece of reconciling work you could have saved them. Skip credential clutter after your name unless the credential is a gate for the job: “RN,” “CPA,” and “PE” earn their place; “MBA” usually reads better in the education section.

One email address. Something that is clearly yours and clearly neutral: some form of your name at a common provider. Retire the address you made in high school. Avoid addresses tied to your current employer — using a work email to job hunt is a bad idea for obvious reasons — and avoid an address on a domain that might block or bounce.

One phone number. The one you’ll actually answer, with a voicemail greeting that says your name. That last part matters more than people expect; a recruiter who reaches an unidentified voicemail box often doesn’t leave a message.

City and state, not a street address. Nobody is mailing you anything. Location matters because employers screen for it — commute range, time zone, work authorization by region — so leaving it off entirely creates a question. City and state, or city and country, is the right resolution. If you’re relocating, “Relocating to Denver, August 2026” is a useful, honest line.

One or two links. A LinkedIn profile is standard and worth including if the profile is current. A portfolio, a professional site, or a public code profile belongs there if the work on it is relevant and reasonably good. Two hard rules: every link must work, and every link must lead somewhere you’d want a hiring manager to spend a minute. A link to an abandoned profile is worse than no link. If it isn’t relevant to the job, leave it off — that includes personal social accounts.

Keep it in the body of the document

This is the one genuinely technical point. Word processors have a “header” region at the top of every page, separate from the body text. It looks identical on screen and it is not the same thing to software that converts your document to plain text — applicant tracking systems (the software employers use to receive and search applications) sometimes drop or mishandle content in that region.

If your name and phone number live there, your application can arrive with no contact details attached. Type your header as normal body text at the top of the first page. Same reasoning applies to putting contact details in a text box, a table, or a sidebar. How ATS works and how to be machine-readable covers the parsing behaviour more broadly.

What to leave off, and why

A photo. Standard practice in some countries and not in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia, where many employers actively prefer resumes without one — some will ask you to remove it before the resume goes to a hiring panel, because of how it interacts with bias-reduction policies. It also takes real space and behaves badly in text extraction. Check the convention where you’re applying; when in doubt, leave it off.

Personal data that isn’t job-relevant. Date of birth, marital status, nationality (unless work authorization needs stating), a religious affiliation, a national ID number. In many markets employers are not supposed to consider these, and volunteering them puts a reader in an awkward position.

Multiple phone numbers and multiple emails. Two of each means the reader picks one and hopes. Pick for them.

Icon rows. A line of little envelope, phone, and pin glyphs next to your details looks tidy and converts to nothing — or to stray characters — when the document becomes plain text. Worse, some templates put the actual detail inside the graphic. Plain text labels or no labels at all.

“Curriculum Vitae” or “Resume” as a title. The reader knows what they’re holding.

“Duties,” “Objective,” and other openers crammed into the header block. The header is contact information. Your summary is a separate thing directly below it, and it has its own job — see how to write a resume summary that earns its space.

Formatting the block

Three or four lines, left-aligned or centered, both fine. A common shape:

• Line 1: Name, larger.
• Line 2: Optional one-line professional title — “Operations Coordinator” — which orients the reader instantly. Useful, and distinct from a summary.
• Line 3: City, State · email · phone.
• Line 4: LinkedIn URL · portfolio URL.

Separators can be pipes, bullets, or generous spacing. If you write out URLs, write them short and readable rather than pasting a long tracking-laden link. Hyperlinking the text is fine; just make sure the visible text still tells a reader where it goes, because someone may be reading a printed copy.

Keep the whole block to roughly the top inch and a half of the page. The header is navigation, not content — every extra line it takes is a line stolen from the accomplishments that actually get you interviewed. If your page is tight, this is one of the first places to recover space, as covered in what to cut from your resume first.

The thirty-second check

Open your resume, look only at the top four lines, and ask: can a stranger reach me two different ways, do they know roughly where I am, and does every link work? Click each one. Then send the file to yourself and confirm the contact details are still visible when you open it on your phone.

That’s the entire job. A header does not need to be interesting. It needs to be complete, plain, and impossible to lose.