A properly formatted resume contact section includes your full name, city and state (not full street address), one phone number, a professional email, a customized LinkedIn URL, and a GitHub or portfolio link if relevant to the role. The single most common ATS parsing failure here is placing contact information in a Microsoft Word document header or text box - both look identical on screen but are invisible to most ATS parsers, meaning recruiters cannot reach you even if your resume scores well.
Your contact section is the first thing a recruiter needs to act on your application, and it is also the most frequently broken part of a resume from an ATS perspective. Getting it right takes less than five minutes but the mistakes are specific and non-obvious.
What to Include (In Order)
Full name: Your professional name - the name you use on LinkedIn and that matches your professional identity. You do not need to include your middle name. You do not need your full legal name as it appears on your ID.
City and state (or city and country, for international applications): Do not include your street address or zip code. Full addresses are a privacy risk, a visual waste of space, and an outdated convention from when physical mail was a recruiter follow-up mechanism. City and state (format: “San Francisco, CA” or “London, UK”) is all that is needed. Some ATS systems use location data for filtering, so do include city/state - omitting it entirely can reduce your visibility for geographically filtered searches.
Phone number: Your primary contact number. Format it consistently: “555-867-5309” or “(555) 867-5309” - both parse correctly. If you are applying internationally from a US number, include the country code: “+1 555-867-5309.”
Email address: Professional format. First name + last name variants are standard. Variations like “john.smith@gmail.com” or “jsmith@outlook.com” are professional. Variations like “partydude42@yahoo.com” or an email from your ISP (comcast.net, aol.com) send a signal you probably do not intend. Gmail or your personal domain are the right choices.
LinkedIn URL: Include it. Format it as a clean URL - ideally your customized LinkedIn profile URL (linkedin.com/in/yourname) rather than the default long-string URL with random characters. Customize your LinkedIn URL first (it takes 30 seconds), then add the clean version to your resume.
GitHub URL (for technical roles): Include it if you have active repositories and are applying to engineering, data science, or technical product roles. Format: “github.com/yourusername” - no protocol prefix needed, it reads cleanly.
Portfolio URL (for relevant roles): Writers, designers, marketers, UX researchers, and other portfolio-dependent roles should include a portfolio link. Format: “yourname.com” or “portfolio.yourname.com” - keep it short and clean.
What Not to Include
Full street address and zip code: Unnecessary, privacy-invasive, and takes up valuable space on the most-read part of your resume.
Photo or headshot: Does not parse, may trigger bias issues in jurisdictions with anti-discrimination laws (many EU countries, Canada, parts of the US), and wastes parsing space with an image object.
Date of birth, age, or graduation year prominently displayed: Can create discrimination exposure for the hiring team and is not a positive signal for you in most contexts.
Social media profiles (unless directly relevant): Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook - do not include these unless you are in social media marketing and your profile is a portfolio signal. Personal social media creates risk without corresponding benefit.
Multiple phone numbers: One number only. “Cell: 555-123-4567 | Home: 555-987-6543” is unnecessary in 2026. Everyone uses their cell phone. Use the number where recruiters will actually reach you.
“References available upon request”: This line appears on many older resume templates. It is understood to be true and wastes a line.
Objective statements in the contact area: This is a structural confusion issue - some older templates place an objective statement directly below the contact info before any section header. This content belongs in your Professional Summary section, not in your contact header.
The Most Common Contact Section Parsing Error
The single most common ATS parsing failure in the contact section: placing it in a Microsoft Word document header (Insert → Header), or in a text box.
Both of these formatting choices make your contact section visually identical to a reader. Both of them cause most ATS parsers to skip the content entirely.
Word document headers are outside the document body. ATS parsers extract body text. Your name and email are invisible to the system. You exist only as a keyword score with no contact information attached.
Text boxes are floating objects. ATS parsers process floating objects inconsistently - sometimes appending them to the end of the extracted text, sometimes dropping them, sometimes processing them in a random order. Your contact information may end up after your last work experience entry, or may not appear at all.
The fix for both: place your contact information as regular paragraph text at the very top of the document body. Use a larger font for your name (16-18pt) and standard size for the contact details below (10-11pt). It looks exactly the same to a human reader. To the ATS, it is now correctly positioned and parseable.
How to check: In Microsoft Word, press Ctrl+Home to go to the very beginning of the document. Is your name visible and editable in the main editing area (not in a gray zone above a dashed line)? Click on your name. Does the Header editing interface appear? If yes, you have a header problem.
Formatting for Readability and Parsing
Place your name on its own line. Then your contact details on one or two lines below it, separated by the pipe character (|) or a bullet point (•) or a simple comma.
Clean, parseable formats:
Jane Smith
San Francisco, CA | (415) 555-0191 | jane.smith@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/janesmithOr:
Jane Smith
San Francisco, CA
jane.smith@gmail.com • 415-555-0191 • linkedin.com/in/janesmithBoth formats parse correctly. The pipe (|) and bullet (•) characters are plain text separators that ATS parsers handle as delimiter characters, not as content.
Formats that create parsing issues:
- Contact info placed inside a table cell (the table-reading issue affects the contact section the same way it affects the experience section)
- Contact info using tab-separated fields where the tab character causes alignment issues
- Using icons or symbols (phone receiver symbol ✆, envelope symbol ✉) before each contact detail - these symbols parse as nothing or as garbled characters in some systems; the context (format of the number and email) is sufficient
LinkedIn URL: Customize It First
The default LinkedIn URL looks like: “linkedin.com/in/janesmith-12a34b56” - a slug with random characters. Recruiters who see this URL know immediately that you have not taken the 30 seconds to customize it, which is a minor professionalism signal.
Customize your LinkedIn URL in LinkedIn Settings → Public profile URL → Edit. Make it “linkedin.com/in/janesmith” or “linkedin.com/in/jane-smith-pm” (your name plus a relevant qualifier if your name is common).
Then add the clean URL to your resume. It looks more professional and is less likely to break if a parser misreads a URL with random characters.
Remote Work Signaling
If you are open to remote roles or specifically targeting remote positions, note it in your location field: “San Francisco, CA (Open to Remote)” or “New York, NY - Remote-first preferred.”
Some ATS systems filter candidates by location for on-site roles. Adding remote availability does not help you get filtered into on-site roles you are not interested in, but it does signal remote availability when a recruiter manually reviews your profile.
If you are fully location-flexible and prioritizing remote roles, you can write “Remote” as your location without a city. Note that this reduces your visibility for locally filtered searches if you are also open to on-site roles in a specific market.
What This Section Should Take You
Building a correct, clean contact section takes under five minutes. If your contact section is more complex than the examples above - multiple pages, elaborate visual design, icons and logos - you have added design complexity that does not help your ATS score and may actively hurt parsing. Simplify it.
The contact section’s only jobs are: get your name into the ATS correctly, make your email parseable, and give the recruiter a way to contact you. Everything else is noise.