What to put in a resume's contact section (and what to leave out)

The contact block is four lines long and causes more silent application failures than any other part of a resume. It's also where most of the "should I include…?" questions live. Here's the whole thing.

The block that works#

Jordan Chen
Austin, TX · (555) 123-4567 · jordan.chen@email.com
linkedin.com/in/jordanchen · jordanchen.dev

Name, location, phone, email, and up to two links — as plain text, in the body of page one. That's it. Everything below is either a justification for one of those choices or a reason something else was left out.

The failure that matters most#

The same applies to contact details inside a text box, a coloured sidebar, an image, or a logo. All of them look fine to you and can vanish in extraction. Put the block in the ordinary body text of the first page, and put it above everything else.

The second failure is icon fonts: the little phone and envelope glyphs that templates place beside each line extract as junk characters and can break the pattern matching that detects a phone number or an email. Delete them. A reader recognizes an email address without a picture of an envelope.

Should you include your address?#

City and state (or city and country). Not your street address.

The street address is a leftover from mailed correspondence. It buys nothing, and it's personal data sitting in an unknown number of databases. But dropping location entirely is a mistake in the other direction — recruiters filter on it, and a resume with no location at all reads as either evasive or overseas.

If you're relocating, say so explicitly: Austin, TX (relocating to Denver, June 2026). An unexplained mismatch between your location and the job's is a question, and questions are friction.

Should you include a photo?#

In the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia: no. Many employers actively discard resumes with photos to limit bias-claim exposure, and the image is dead weight to a parser.

In much of continental Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and the Middle East, a photo is conventional and its absence looks careless. Follow the norm where you're applying — and if you apply across regions, keep two versions rather than compromising on one.

Which links, and how to write them#

That last point is a parsing detail worth knowing: write the visible URL text (linkedin.com/in/jordanchen) rather than hiding it behind a word. Some parsers keep the visible text and drop the hyperlink, so a resume that says only "Portfolio" arrives with no address attached. Dropping the https:// is fine — keep it readable.

Before adding LinkedIn, make sure the profile doesn't contradict the resume; titles and dates especially. Keeping the two consistent matters more than having the link at all.

Pronouns#

Increasingly common and entirely fine to include — (they/them) beside your name. It's a personal call, it varies by field and region, and neither including nor omitting them affects parsing in any way.

What to leave out#

• Date of birth, age, marital status, nationality — not asked for in most Western markets, and in several jurisdictions employers actively don't want them. Follow local convention if you're applying somewhere they're expected.
• A full street address — see above.
• Multiple phone numbers — pick the one you'll answer.
• An unprofessional email address — a free-mail address is completely fine; the handle attached to it is what matters.
• "References available on request" — assumed, and it's a wasted line.
• Your current work email — using an employer's address to job-hunt is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with resumes.

Check that it survived#

This is the easiest thing on your resume to verify and the most expensive to get wrong. Copy your PDF into a plain-text editor and confirm your phone number and email are present, intact, and not fused to a stray character.

Or run the free MeritSlate checker: the nine-vendor parse simulation reports what each parser recovered from your file, so a contact block that vanishes in two of nine systems shows up as a finding rather than as silence.