What not to put on a resume: 11 things to leave off

Leave off your age and date of birth, a photo, your marital status and children, skill bars and star ratings, contact details placed in the page header, hidden keywords, and any number you did not count. Those are the main things not to put on a resume for a US or UK employer.

Each one comes off for one of three reasons, and the reason matters more than the list:

1. The employer is not allowed to decide on it, so it can only hurt you.
2. A parser cannot read it, so it either vanishes or scrambles the text around it.
3. You cannot defend it in an interview, so it turns into a question you cannot answer.

The first group changes by country. The other two do not. The list below is written for the US and the UK, and the section on other countries says where it stops being true.

Facts the employer may not decide on

1. Your age or date of birth

The UK government's National Careers Service says it in one sentence: "You should not include your age, your date of birth, whether you're married or your nationality." The rule on the employer's side is just as plain. UK employers "can only ask for someone's date of birth on an application form if they must be a certain age to do the job", according to GOV.UK's recruitment guidance.

So a date of birth answers a question the reader is not supposed to ask. It cannot win you the interview. It can only give someone a reason to skip you that they would never write down.

The same goes for the side door: graduation years from forty years ago, or a first job listed from 1985. A resume is not a complete employment history, and nothing obliges you to list every role you ever held.

2. A photo

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in its guidance on prohibited employment practices, writes that "employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant". If a photo is needed for identification, it is collected after an offer is made and accepted.

A photo also counts twice against you, because it is a graphic. More on that in the second group.

3. Marital status, children, religion and nationality

GOV.UK tells employers they must not ask whether a candidate is "married, single or in a civil partnership" or whether they "have children or plan to have children". The EEOC calls race, sex, national origin, age and religion "irrelevant" to hiring decisions and warns that asking about them "may be used as evidence of an employer's intent to discriminate".

Nationality has a narrower true version. What the employer needs to know is whether you have the right to work, and that is a question on the application form, not a line on your resume. Answer it there, accurately, because a form answer is what an automatic rejection rule reads. How to answer each knockout question on the form covers that one.

Things a parser cannot read

An applicant tracking system (ATS) turns your file into fields: name, email, job titles, dates. Greenhouse, one of the widely used systems, publishes the causes of a failed parse on its Unsuccessful resume parse page. Four of the items below come straight from that list.

4. Skill bars, star ratings and charts

"Python ●●●●○" is a picture, and Greenhouse lists "Resumes that include graphics, photos, or word art" as a parse problem. The parser gets nothing, or it gets a run of symbols where a skill used to be.

There is a second problem, and no software is involved. Four stars out of five, measured against what? Nobody reading it can tell whether four means "I wrote the payment service" or "I took a course". Write the skill as a word, and put the proof in a bullet under the job where you used it.

5. Your name and contact details in the header or a text box

Greenhouse lists "Resumes with the name and contact information in the header, footer, or text box". Many templates put exactly those lines there, because it looks tidy. If the parser skips them, the recruiter gets a profile with no name and no email.

Move them into the body of the page, as the first lines of text. It costs nothing and removes a documented failure.

6. Abbreviated job titles

This one surprises people. Greenhouse also lists "Resumes with incomplete job titles. For example, Sr. Account Exec instead of Senior Account Executive".

Write the title in full. A recruiter searching for "Senior Account Executive" is searching for words, and "Sr. Account Exec" does not contain them.

7. Hidden keywords in white text

Pasting the job description in white or one-point text to feed a screener is still a common tip. It shows up as soon as anyone views the parsed text, and nobody has shown that it works. What happens to white text on a resume has the study that counted how often people try it.

Before you send anything, check what a parser actually gets from your file. Upload your resume and Rzume shows you the parse first, for free and without an account. A missing name or a scrambled job title is visible on the first screen.

Claims you cannot defend in an interview

8. A number you did not count

This is the item that costs the most, and most lists leave it out.

Resume advice says to add numbers. So people add them: "reduced costs by 30%", "improved efficiency by 40%". If you did not measure it, an interviewer who asks "30% of what, measured how?" has just found the weakest line on the page, and you have to explain it out loud.

A vague true line is safer than a precise false one. The honest middle step is to leave the gap visible while you find the real figure:

Moved [how many accounts, and over how long?] off the legacy billing system

That bracket is a question you can answer from your own records, an old email or a former colleague. When you have the answer, the line becomes specific and true. If you never find it, the line stays as "Moved customer accounts off the legacy billing system", which is weaker and still something you can talk about for five minutes.

This is how Rzume's rewrite works. It asks for the figure. If you skip the question, the gap stays in the draft as a bracket like the one above, and nothing is filled in for you.

9. Adjectives about yourself

"Results-driven", "detail-oriented", "passionate team player". Every reader has seen them on hundreds of resumes, and none of them can be checked. A bullet that shows a result does the job the adjective was trying to do.

Things that put your privacy at risk

10. Your full street address and any ID number

A city is enough, plus a phone number, an email and, if you keep it current, a LinkedIn URL. That matches what the National Careers Service lists for contact details.

Your resume will be forwarded, uploaded to job boards and stored in systems you will never see. A Social Security number, passport number or bank detail does not belong on it. The US Federal Trade Commission's page on job scams warns that "if you gave your personal information thinking it was for payroll, you may now have an identity theft problem". Payroll details go on payroll paperwork, after an offer, to an employer you have verified.

11. "References available upon request"

To be fair, the National Careers Service suggests this exact wording if you do not list references. It is not wrong. It is just empty, because every employer assumes you will provide references when asked. Cut it first when the page is too long.

Where this list stops being true

The first group is written for the US and the UK. In other countries the convention for personal details is different, and the official advice says so.

The source for the German column is the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, which also says some employers ask for an anonymised CV with no photo at all. For the Netherlands, how to write a Dutch CV in English goes through each personal field.

The parser group and the interview group hold everywhere. A skill bar is a picture in Berlin too, and an invented number gets asked about in Amsterdam.

Before you send it

1. Delete your date of birth, photo, marital status and street address, unless the country you are applying in expects them.
2. Replace every skill bar with the word for the skill.
3. Move your name and contact details out of the header and into the page.
4. Write every job title in full.
5. Read each number aloud and ask where it came from. If you cannot say, put a bracket in its place and go and find out.
6. Check the file itself, in two minutes, with is my resume ATS friendly. If you are still deciding on the format, PDF or Word covers the one thing that actually breaks.

See what the parser keeps

The fastest check is to look. Upload your resume and Rzume shows the parse and a full review before it asks for anything. If your name lives in the header or a skill bar turned into symbols, you will see it before an employer's system does.

Sources

• National Careers Service, CV sections.
• GOV.UK, Employers: preventing discrimination, recruitment.
• US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Prohibited employment policies/practices.
• Greenhouse, Unsuccessful resume parse, last updated 2 March 2026.
• US Federal Trade Commission, Job scams.
• Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Bewerbung schreiben.
• Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Musterlebenslauf mit Anleitung (PDF).

All accessed 30 October 2026.