Required Vs Optional Address
Some positions, such as those for federal or other government organizations, require you to share your address when you first apply. This is usually because they need to run a background check on you before they can let you go any farther in the application process.
Other companies may want to do this as well, so if youre applying to an organization like a school or high-profile tech company where you think this might be required, you should consider adding your address to your resume. Most companies will ask you for this information when theyre ready to run the check, though.
Other times, job postings may list location requirements for applicants. If this is the case, they will probably set up their screening processes to look for an address right off the bat.
To make sure your resume gets a second look, at least share your city and state or, better yet, your city, state, and ZIP code. If you dont, you run a high risk of not making it to the interview stage.
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Adding your address to a resume is a traditional expectation from hiring managers.
But what is the expectation for more modern resumes?
The answer ultimately depends on several factors, including:
- The location of the job
- Whether the job description specifically asks for an address
- How relevant the address is to the job
A hiring manager is unlikely to communicate via physical mail, so they are also unlikely to use your address as a method for contacting you.
Instead, employers will likely use addresses as a point of reference for:
- Where an applicant lives
- The applicantâs proximity to the job
- Whether or not the applicant will need to relocate
Pros And Cons To Including Your Address
Pros:
- It shows employers that youre local. Many hiring managers want to have a general sense of where you live and how far you are from the business.
- It can clear up confusion based on job history. If youve worked remotely or relocated, your career history may show cities or states that are not where you currently live.
- If youve recently moved, it shows that you live in the area where you are applying for jobs. Your previous job may have been in a different state, but your address shows you live where youre applying.
- It doesnt look like youre hiding anything. Sometimes people leave their address off if theyre trying to relocate and dont want to show that they live out of the area.
Cons:
- On the flip side, if you are relocating, having your current address can make employers wonder why youre applying for jobs in a different city or state, or wonder if youre serious about moving.
- It can bring up concerns about whether youll stick with the job if you have a long commute.
- Some people are concerned about their privacy and potential identity theft.
If you dont want to include your full address, you can always just list your city and state. This still gives employers a sense of where you are and often times theyll be able to figure it out anyway by looking at your most recent job or searching you out online, so why not include it from the start?
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The Reason You Left The Job
Save this information for the interview. Whether you left the job in order to advance your career, or you were terminated, explanations on paper have to be far too brief to give a future employer a favorable impression. At an interview, you are far more likely to be able to place a good spin on even an unpleasant termination.
Spelling And Grammatical Errors
A recruiter survey by TopResume found spelling and/or grammatical errors to be the No. 1 resume mistake that could cost you the job. However, with a little effort, you can easily avoid this resume deal-breaker. Print your resume out in a different font, read it aloud, and ask someone with impeccable writing skills to edit your resume for grammar.
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Your First & Last Name
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Your middle name is optional. Include it if you want to distinguish yourself from other job candidates.
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You can use your given first name or your shortened first name. However, it is not advisable to use a nickname. It leads to formation of opinions.
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Your name should be at the top. It should be able to stand out. You can make your name a larger than the rest of the fonts. Or bold your name. Or both. You can center your contact details or align it to the right.
HIRATION PROTIP: For your work profiles, it’s the industry standard to align your location and time period to the right
- Leave a space or horizontal line between the end of your contact information and the next section of your resume.
Option #: Tell A White Lie
This option is great if you dont want to tell a flat out lie, but youre not getting enough interviews telling the truth on your resume.
Heres what to do Put your name and phone number on your resume, but dont list an address. Where youd normally put an address, instead say something like Relocating to Denver in March 2017. .
Using this approach to apply for jobs in a different city or state should get you a higher number of interviews without having to lie about where you currently live.
This is still a bit of a lie, since youre probably not going to relocate without a job offer, but its also quite true- your goal is to find a job in the new city, and your plan is to relocate to that city if you can find a suitable position.
This will get you the greatest number of phone interviews and will keep your resume out of the garbage pile.
If you do ask you an interview question about this in the first conversation , you can tell them you plan on relocating either way but you are trying to secure a job beforehand. That will put their mind at ease and quickly convince them youre serious about finding a job in their city.
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Your Location May Affect Your Candidacy
There are two main forms of bias you may encounter when including an address:
- âLocation Bias: Location bias involves discrimination based on your physical location. For instance, letâs say a job applicant who lives in Miami, FL is applying for a job in Pheonix, AZ. They may encounter location bias due to being several states away.â
- Distance Bias: Distance bias occurs when a job applicant lives in the same city or state as the business but is still not close in proximity. This typically occurs when job applicants would have to commute more than 30 minutes to their place of work.
These kinds of biases are why many applicants choose to exclude their addresses from resumes.
As an alternative to excluding the address, consider removing your street address only!
A less specific address can help you get your foot in the door and avoid location or distance bias.
Should You Remove Your Physical Address From Your Resume
Executive & Leadership Coach who helps individuals take ownership of their leadership and career.
Dear Coach Wolfgang, a friend of mine told me to take off my physical address from my resume. Should I?
A very timely question! The answer is… it depends. There is no physical address rule you must follow on your resume . Resume formats change with the times and whether or not to include physical address is one of those questions that would not have been asked even a few years ago. The mailing address used to be necessary for companies to send you an interview request or a No Thank You letter. Those practices no longer exist. Now this type of correspondence is completed via the phone or electronic communication.
There are some reasons to consider including your physical address on your resume and other reasons to leave it off. I also posed this question to fellow resume experts and career coaches and have summarized their opinions below.
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What Should My Resume Include
- Personal details Start by listing your full name and contact information, including your phone number and email address.
- Career objective or summary These are short statements to help you pitch yourself. If youve recently left school or university and dont have much professional experience yet, begin your resume with a career objective a sentence or two outlining your skills and your work ambitions. If you have experience in the workforce, you might want to include a short career summary instead, describing your experience and where youre aiming to go next in your career.
Next, include your education or work experience start with whichever is more recent.
After this, its a good idea to add some more information to reinforce or add to the picture of what youve got to offer.
- Skills, strengths or interests You could create headings for these topics and list information thats relevant to the job youre applying for. Highlight any relevant professional memberships, too.
- References Most employers will require references from people you know professionally who can vouch for your skills and abilities. You could include contact and company details for a former employer, manager, or an academic advisor if they agree to be your referee, or you might wish to write references available on request.
If You Have Found A Job Posting On A Third
A safer option would be to find the same posting on a secure site or the companys direct website. If you suspect a fraudulent or otherwise suspicious job posting on Indeed, please contact Indeed immediately. You can visit our Guidelines for Safe Job Search for additional information.
Another way to mitigate applying to fraudulent posts is to look at company reviews on Indeed Company Pages or do a web search on the company along with search terms like scam to see if job seekers have experienced issues in their applications.
Related: The Complete Guide to Researching a Company
If you dont live in the same city as the job youre applying for, listing your current address can get your resume quickly rejected. Especially if the employer is looking for a local candidate. Instead, consider adding a line notating your intent to relocate, like this:
Relocating to Tampa, FL in Fall 2018
It is important to be honest with employers about your current physical location if they indicate wanting a local candidate, but adding your willingness and desire to relocate to the employers area can give your application a better chance.
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Resume Reference Page Example
Check out this properly formatted resume references example to see what a references list looks like in practice:
Note that in this example, the candidate matches the style of her reference page to her resume design.
If you need to include a list of references with your resume, be sure to match the formatting to the rest of your application.
What To Leave Out
Your resume is meant to give a summary of your skills and experience so theres no need to include every detail. Some information isnt necessary in a resume:
- Leave out personal details such as your home address, religion, age or marital status
- Theres no need to list every job youve ever had especially if a job isnt relevant to the role youre applying for now.
- Dont include your salary expectations or previous salaries youve received you can list this information in your SEEK Profile.
Still not sure where to start? Download our free resume template and make it your own.
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Resume Contact Information Example :
Click on the following link to view all of our resume samples and see the many ways you can format your name and address on a resume.
Need help formatting your resume for success? TopResume’s expert writers can help.
Amanda Augustine is a certified professional career coach and resume writer and the resident career expert for Talent Inc.’s suite of brands: TopResume, TopCV, and TopInterview. On a regular basis, she answers user questions like the one above. Have a question? Take a look at her career advice or ask a question on her Quora page.
Adding A Link To Your Resume In Your About Section
The next way to add your resume to LinkedIn is to include a link in the text-based sections of your profile.
This could be your About section, Experience section, or anywhere else that you can add free form text. My recommendation is to add the link to your resume at the bottom of your About section, like this:
Pro Tip: Don’t just paste a naked Google Drive or OneDrive link into your LinkedIn profile. Instead, try to use a custom domain that aligns with your personal brand.
The best option here is to use a personal website that has your name in the domain. For example, I would use austinbelcak.com and I’d have a redirect link to my resume.
Alternatively, you can use a site like Bitly or Cut.ly to generate a custom link. In that case, using your name in the file path would be best, like this: bitly.com/austin-resume
Now anyone who reads your About section is going to see the option to view a live copy of your resume! Having these customized links also looks a lot better when you add them to your resume as well.
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Why Should You Still Include Your Location On Your Resume
Even if youre not listing your full address on a resume, adding your location helps recruiters and hiring managers make decisions about their workforce says Muse career coach Matthew Ford. So if your location makes you a better potential hire, you should share that information. For example, some jobs have long hours and are centered around your presence in the office, Ford says, so showing you live in the area might signal, rightly or not, that youd be more available to make this work than someone who lives much farther away.
Local candidates are the safest candidates, Liou says. Companies always want to identify local talent first because theres no need to wait for them to relocate or to pay a relocation package. Youre also less likely to leave if you dont have a long or difficult commute: One survey found that 23% of workers have quit a job due to a bad commute.
As such, many recruiters will start to narrow down the pool of applicants who applied for a job by searching within a few miles of the offices city or zip code in the applicant tracking system , Liou says. ATSs are the programs many recruiters and companies use to keep track of applicants and to search submitted resumes for certain keywords or attributes, such as your geographic location.
Your Exact Home Address May Affect The Salary Offer
Some companies offer car, transportation, or fuel allowance. Your eligibility for these benefits may depend on your exact home address. For instance, fuel allowance may only be given to applicants with cars or those living outside a specified kilometer radius from the companys location.
The factors above arent the only ones you should consider though, as those only apply to legitimate jobs. Your resume, since it’ll be submitted online, might be exposed to much more than that.
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Best Email Domain For Resume
You want your email address to make the right impression, which is why it is best if you go with Gmail or your own domain instead of a more outdated domain such as AOL.
I think the easiest way is to make an email account with Gmail.
This is super easy to set up.
Just fill in a few things:
and you are all set!
Helping Yourself Get Hired
When youre making decisions about what to include on your resumewhether its your address, some of the positions youve held in the past, or information that may be considered extraneousits important to keep in mind that your goal in writing your resume is to get hired.
You want to make it as easy as possible for an employer to decide to schedule an interview and, eventually, offer you the job.
Focus on highlighting your most relevant attributes for each job that you are pursuing, taking the time to match your qualifications to the position and tweaking your resume so it gets past the screening systems and noticed by recruiters.
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Should I Put My Address On My Resume
When considering what to put on a resume, understand that including your address is traditional, but not required. Whether or not you include it depends on your:
If youre not sure what to do, weve outlined the pros and cons of putting your addressing on your resume so that you can make the best decision for yourself.
Its Preferred By Applicant Tracking Systems
An important aspect of applying for jobs today is knowing how ATS software works, because nearly 40 percent of employers use it to screen candidates.
ATS software filters resumes by locating certain key terms, and for certain pieces of software, your address is one of those key terms. By leaving out your address on your resume, you may accidentally put yourself out of the running.
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