It depends on your industry. I work on hiring engineers at a startup, so I can only speak to the kinds of things I look for in an eng resume, and my comments pr

It depends on your industry. I work on hiring engineers at a startup, so I can only speak to the kinds of things I look for in an eng resume, and my comments probably don't apply to more creative fields like design (where layout is much more important). For engineering resumes, content trumps layout. As long as your resume is legible and is in a common format (pdf, doc, txt), it should be fine. Before I go on to talk about content, here are a few legibility fails I've encountered: - 3+ pages (unless you invented the lightbulb; otherwise STFU) - Poor use of endlines. OK, now onto content. You should have the following sections: - Contact info (email, phone, and [GitHub, your website, StackOverflow, etc]) - Education - Jobs - Personal projects, if any (NOT CLASS PROJECTS) - Skills (optional, see below) That's it. No objective (in 99% of resumes this is bullshit fluff), no summary (see the part about bullshit fluff), no "references available upon request". The last thing I'll say about content is that you should try your best to explain what you actually worked on at each of your jobs. I don't care about how you used Hibernate to accomplish Object Relational Mapping. That's what Hibernate does. That's not what you did. Similarly, please try not to pepper your resume with a bunch of buzzwords. I know that you my need buzzwords to get past the HR filter, but if so, please list the languages you know and all the frameworks you've used in one "Skills" section at the end. Use common sense when trying to decide how many languages to drop in in a job description -- if you were explaining to your friend what you did, would you mention the language? If so, include it. If not, don't. If you found this helpful and have further questions or want me to take a look, please feel free to email me (see my HN user info).