What to Put in the Contact Information on a Resume

What belongs there

Five items, in roughly this order, occupying two lines at the top of the page. This block does not need a heading — nobody has ever failed to identify a name and a phone number at the top of a resume.

Your name

The largest text on the page, in the form you want to be addressed by. If you go by a shortened version of your legal name, use it here and keep the legal name for the offer paperwork.

Phone number

One number, the mobile you carry. Two numbers just makes the reader choose. Include the country code if you are applying internationally.

Email address

Some plain construction of your own name. Free providers are entirely fine; a novelty address from 2009 is not.

Location

City and state, or city and country. Enough to answer the commuting and work-authorisation questions in the reader's head, and nothing more.

One professional link

LinkedIn for most people, a portfolio or repository for people whose work is visible. As a clean URL, not the tracking-parameter version the site hands you.

That is the whole block. Anything beyond it is either noise or a liability, and the second category is longer than most people expect.

What to leave off, and why

Some of these are matters of taste. Several are not — in the United States, employers may not base hiring decisions on protected characteristics including race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability and genetic information, as set out in the EEOC's guidance on prohibited practices. Volunteering that information in a header does not help a lawful employer and gives an unlawful one something to act on before anyone reads your experience.

The details that quietly break

Every recruiter has a story about a candidate they wanted and could not reach. These are the ways it happens, and all of them are preventable in about four minutes.

1. The phone number has a typo. Read it aloud digit by digit against your own phone. Do not check it by looking at it, because you will read what you meant to type.
2. The mailbox is full or the filter is aggressive. Send yourself a message from a different account, then check the spam folder. An employer's automated reply landing in spam is how a lot of applications quietly die.
3. The voicemail is not set up. A recruiter who reaches an unconfigured mailbox usually moves to the next name rather than trying again. Record a plain greeting with your name in it.
4. The link is broken or private. Open every URL in a private browser window. A portfolio that is visible to you because you are logged in is invisible to everybody else.
5. The email in the file does not match the one you applied from. Confusing on its own, and worse when a reply goes to an address you no longer read.
6. The header sits in a document header field. Some applicant tracking systems ignore the header and footer regions of a document entirely, which can strip your contact details out of the parsed record. Keep the block in the body of the page.

The last one is worth emphasising because it is invisible to the writer. If you want to see what a parser actually extracts from your file, run it through the ATS checker, which reports the contact fields it managed to read.

Formatting the block

One line for the name, one or two for everything else, separated by a consistent divider — a vertical bar, a bullet or an en dash. Avoid icons unless you are confident about how they survive parsing: a phone glyph rendered as an image conveys nothing to a machine, and a glyph from an icon font can arrive as a stray character. If you use them, keep the text label alongside.

The email address

Firstname.lastname is the default and needs no thought. If it is taken, add a middle initial, a professional qualifier or a number that is not your year of birth. What you are avoiding is anything that reads as a joke, anything that references your age, and anything that hints at a personal characteristic. A separate address used only for applications is also a practical idea, because it keeps offers and interview invitations out of a mailbox full of newsletters.

Adding a title line

A single line under your name naming the role you are applying for — "Senior Financial Analyst" — is a small, effective addition when you are targeting one job title. It orients the reader in one second and matches the language of the posting. It works against you when it is aspirational rather than accurate, or when you send the same file to roles with different titles and forget to change it.

Location, remote work and relocation

Location is the one contact field where strategy genuinely matters, because it is the field most likely to filter you out before a human reads anything.

• Applying locally. City and state, and nothing more to think about.
• Applying to a fully remote role. Give your city and state anyway — time zone and work authorisation are real operational questions — and consider adding your zone: "Denver, CO (Mountain Time)".
• Relocating. State it plainly: "Relocating to Austin, TX in June" or "Seeking roles in the Seattle area". A distant address with no explanation is a common reason for a quiet rejection.
• Already moved but the paperwork has not caught up. Use the city you will be working from. You are describing where you will be, not filing a change of address.
• Do not invent a local address. It surfaces at background-check or payroll stage and turns a neutral fact into a credibility problem.

Once the block is right, it is right for every application you send, which makes it the single highest-return two minutes on the whole document. Set it once in the builder and it carries across every template and export. If you would like someone to look over the finished page, the resume review checks the header along with everything under it.