The American resume is the most stripped-down document in this list. No photo, no birth date, no marital status, no references — anything that could identify a protected characteristic is deliberately absent, and anything that is not evidence of what you can do is cut for space. One page is the working assumption, machine parsing is the first reader, and quantified bullets are the currency.
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The six questions people ask most, answered in a line each.
What it's called in United States: Resume
1 page — 2 only past ~10 years
One page is the default and applies to almost everyone under a decade of experience. A second page is earned by seniority, not by having more to say.
Never
US employers avoid photos to reduce discrimination exposure under EEOC rules. A photo resume signals unfamiliarity with the market and is sometimes discarded unread.
US English, US spelling
Organize, not organise. Program, not programme. Mixed British spelling reads as a copy-pasted document from another market.
Mon YYYY — Jan 2023 – Mar 2025
Right-aligned, reverse-chronological, month plus year. "Present" for the current role. Bare years look like rounding.
PDF, US Letter, single column
Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf on 8.5 × 11 inch Letter paper. Send DOCX only when the recruiter explicitly asks for it.
Left off entirely
Not even "available on request" — US recruiters read that line as wasted space, since everyone knows references come later.
Resumito's country engine turns each of these on or off automatically when you pick United States as your target.
Profile photo
Employers in United States can't ask for this — we strip it out to keep you compliant.
Date of birth
Employers in United States can't ask for this — we strip it out to keep you compliant.
Nationality
We keep this field out of your United States resume.
Marital status
Employers in United States can't ask for this — we strip it out to keep you compliant.
Military service status
We keep this field out of your United States resume.
Place of birth
We keep this field out of your United States resume.
References
Left off the resumeHobbies & interests
Not shownTop to bottom, the order a United States employer expects to read.
Header
Name, phone, email, city and state, LinkedIn, portfolio. As body text, not inside a document header — ATS parsers routinely skip headers.
Summary (optional)
Two or three lines, only if it says something specific. A generic "hardworking professional seeking opportunities" is worse than nothing.
Experience
The heart of the document, usually 60–70% of the page. Title, company, location, dates, then three to five achievement bullets.
Skills
Hard skills and tools only. No soft-skill lists, no proficiency bars — a five-star rating for Python tells a recruiter nothing verifiable.
Education
Degree, institution, year. GPA only if you graduated recently and it is above 3.0. Below the experience section unless you are a new graduate.
Projects or certifications
Optional closer. Valuable for career changers and engineers; skip it if it pushes you onto a second page.
The one-page convention is not an aesthetic preference; it comes from the arithmetic of American hiring. A single posting at a mid-size company routinely draws several hundred applications, and the first human pass is measured in seconds per resume. A second page is rarely read, so material you move there is effectively deleted — while the reader's impression of your judgment is formed by what you chose to keep.
Cut in this order. Roles older than ten to twelve years become one line each or disappear. Bullets that describe duties rather than outcomes go first — "responsible for managing the reporting process" is a job description, not an accomplishment. Then remove the objective statement, the references line, the skills bars, the full mailing address, and anything about hobbies. What remains should be three to five bullets on each recent role and one line on each older one.
The American convention is action verb, then what you did, then the measurable result. "Rebuilt the checkout flow in React, cutting cart abandonment from 68% to 51% over two quarters" works because every clause is checkable. Compare it with "worked on improving the checkout experience", which describes the same six months and proves nothing.
If you do not have clean metrics — and plenty of honest work does not — quantify the scale instead of the outcome: how many users, how large a budget, how many people on the team, how many markets, how often it ran. "Owned monthly close for three subsidiaries, ~$40M combined revenue" carries weight without inventing a percentage. Never invent one; American reference checks and interview probing are specific enough that a fabricated number becomes an awkward conversation.
Almost every large US employer runs an applicant tracking system, and the ways resumes break in one are boringly consistent: two-column layouts read out of order, tables and text boxes lose their contents, contact details inside a page header get dropped, icons replace the words they stand for, and creative section titles do not map to the fields the system expects. Use one column, standard headings (Experience, Skills, Education), real text for everything, and a common font.
Then match the posting's own vocabulary. Systems rank on string matches, so if the ad says "Kubernetes" your resume should say Kubernetes rather than "container orchestration", and an acronym should appear once with its expansion: "SQL (Structured Query Language)". This is not keyword stuffing — invisible white text and keyword blocks are detected and get applications blacklisted. It is simply using the employer's words for things you have genuinely done.
US federal law restricts what employers may consider in hiring, so recruiters prefer not to receive the information at all. Off the page: photograph, date of birth, age, gender, marital status, number of children, religion, nationality, health, and a full home address. Interviewers are trained not to ask about these, and a resume that volunteers them creates a compliance problem for the person reading it.
Two more that surprise people. Graduation years can be omitted if you are worried about age screening — degree and institution are enough. And military service, which is a standard field on an Iranian resume, has no equivalent here: US resumes mention military service only when it was a job, in which case it is written up like any other role with rank, duties and achievements.
The errors that sink the largest number of otherwise strong resumes.
Adding a photo or personal details
The clearest marker of a resume built for another market. Photo, birth date and marital status all create legal exposure for the employer and give a screener a reason to move on.
Writing duties instead of results
"Responsible for social media" describes a chair. "Grew Instagram from 4k to 61k followers in 11 months, driving 18% of signups" describes a person worth interviewing.
A two-column "designer" template
Sidebars, icons and skill meters look good on screen and parse into nonsense. Unless you are applying to a design studio that reviews PDFs by hand, use one column.
Keeping "References available upon request"
Standard in Canada and the UK, redundant in the US. It spends a line of a one-page document saying something every recruiter already assumes.
One resume for every application
US screening is keyword-first. Re-ordering your skills and rewriting the summary to match each posting is a few minutes of work with a measurably higher callback rate.
Be realistic about the funnel: most US employers filter first on work authorization, so an applicant abroad without a visa faces a narrow path — largely H-1B sponsors, O-1 candidates with a strong record, university and research positions, and fully remote contract work. Your resume should not argue immigration policy. It should state your status in one line and then be so specific about your work that a sponsor-willing company has a reason to spend the paperwork on you.
Translate the Iranian conventions out. Military service, marital status, date of birth, national ID and photo all come off. Persian-language section headings come off. Company names that mean nothing abroad get a scale clause — "Digikala (largest e-commerce marketplace in Iran, ~40M monthly visits)". Your university keeps its English name as it appears on your transcript, so a recruiter searching for it finds the real institution.
For remote contract work — a realistic and growing route — the resume matters less than a public trail of evidence: a GitHub with real commits, published writing, a portfolio, an Upwork or Toptal history. Link them from the header. American clients hiring across borders substitute verifiable public work for the references and background checks they would otherwise run.
One page for almost everyone with under ten years of experience, including career changers and recent graduates. Two pages are acceptable for senior and executive roles, or for a federal or academic CV, which follow their own longer conventions entirely.
No. US employers avoid photos to limit discrimination exposure under EEOC rules, and some recruiting teams have a policy of discarding resumes that include one. The only exceptions are acting and modelling, where a headshot is the product.
In American usage they are different documents. A resume is the one-page marketing document for industry jobs. A CV is a long academic record — publications, grants, teaching, conferences — used for research, faculty and some medical positions, and it has no length limit.
Only if you graduated within the last two or three years and it is above roughly 3.0 on a 4.0 scale. If your degree is from Iran, convert it and show both — "3.6/4.0 (17.4/20)" — so nobody has to guess at the scale.
Do not put it on the resume. Every US application form asks the authorization question directly, and that is where you answer it honestly. If you already hold status — green card, citizenship, valid work authorization — a single line saying so is worth including, because it removes a barrier.
Large ones almost universally, and many mid-size ones too. In practice this matters less as a keyword scoring gate than as a parsing risk: if the system reads your columns out of order or drops your phone number from a page header, no ranking algorithm is needed to lose you.
Only if it was employment you want to be evaluated on, written up like any other role with duties and achievements. The Iranian-style status field — completed, exempt, deferred — has no meaning in the US and should be removed.
It's not the same template. Resumito's country engine (8 data points per country) toggles which personal fields and sections appear based on your target country — United States gets its own rules, shown above.
Yes — you can build and download your first United States-formatted resume on the free plan, no credit card required.
Yes, you can change your target country any time from the resume editor and Resumito re-applies the field rules instantly.
Pick United States as your target country and Resumito turns each of these fields on or off for you — nothing to memorise.
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