What to Put in a Resume Header (and What to Leave Off)

Include

• Name as you use it at work.
• Phone with country code if you apply abroad.
• A professional email you check.
• City and country (or metro). Full street address is rarely needed for private-sector jobs.
• LinkedIn. GitHub or portfolio if the work is public and relevant.

Usually leave off

• Photo, date of birth, marital status, religion, and parent names — unless a government or specific-country form requires them.
• Multiple emails and every social network.
• Headline graphics that turn your name into an image.

ATS and photos

Many Indian private firms and almost all US ATS flows don't need a photo. A photo template (if you use one in MineResume) is for roles that expect it. Keep the email as selectable text in the header, not only inside a picture.

What the header is actually for

Strip away the design talk and the header has one job: let a interested stranger contact you and know within two seconds what they're looking at. Name, reachable contact, location, one or two links, done. Everything else on the first band of the page either serves those two jobs or costs you space that the experience section desperately needs. I've watched template designs bury the name under three lines of decorative nothing — a headline graphic, an objective, a full postal address — and the result is always the same: the screener squints to find the human. Treat every header element with suspicion. If it doesn't help someone reach you or identify your job family, it's decoration, and decoration on a resume is a tax the reader pays.

The name line and the optional title line

Name first, biggest thing on the page, spelled exactly as it appears on your certificates and payroll records — not your nickname, not the casual name colleagues use, because HR compares text fields and a mismatch creates an account problem on day one. Use the name you'd sign a contract with; if you go by a shortened version professionally, put it in quotes in the middle: "Ananya 'Nani' Krishnan" is legal and common; dropping your formal name entirely because the app store login uses the nickname is not. Some people now add a single title line under the name — "Financial Analyst — FP&A" — which is genuinely useful for the ten-second screen and doubles as the job-family anchor the summary repeats. What it must not be is a slogan. "Turning ideas into impact" is a header line that tells a stranger nothing and eats the vertical space your dates were going to use.

Email, phone, and the small mechanics nobody checks

Email: an address you check daily, ideally plain firstname.lastname or firstname-initial + surname. The childhood-handle problems are real — "sk8rboi2003@" gets read, and it gets read with an eyebrow raised. A free Gmail is fine; a custom-domain address is a nicety, not a status symbol, and recruiters genuinely do not care which provider you use. Phone: with country code if there's any cross-border element to the application (+91 for India), because international screeners won't guess whether "98765" is complete. If the call actually comes and you can't answer, your voicemail gets audited — a mailbox full of unread messages from last month is a fixable ten-minute embarrassment. And type the digits you want spoken back to you; the parser will store whatever characters you give it, so "98 76 five 43 21" is not a stylistic choice, it's a broken field.

Location: how much does anyone actually need?

City and country, occasionally metro area, is the modern norm for private-sector hiring almost everywhere. The full street address is a fossil from an era when resumes were postal mail — and today it's mostly a liability: it signals nothing useful, wastes a line, and hands strangers your home location on a PDF that gets forwarded around. The genuinely useful variants: if you're applying somewhere you don't yet live, "Bengaluru (relocating June)" or "Chennai — open to Pune" prevents the immediate "why is a Chennai person applying to my Gurgaon role?" reflex, which is a rejection you can delete with four words. For remote roles, time zone beats street. And if a form legally requires an address, that's the form's business; your resume doesn't have to volunteer it.

Links: the vanity-URL and tap-through rules

One LinkedIn, always. GitHub if the work is public and worth clicking; portfolio link for design, writing, or product roles; nothing else — your X account, Instagram, and last.fm are not going on the page. Two mechanics that fail more often than the links existing at all. First, the vanity URL: a profile that still reads "linkedin.com/in/johndoe-28f3a91" looks like a default nobody revisited, and it's a two-minute fix on LinkedIn itself. Second, the actual click: as text or as a live hyperlink both work in modern parsers, but every URL in your header must be pasted into a browser and seen before export. A 404 on your portfolio is worse than no portfolio link, because the recruiter who clicks it now has a story about you, and it's about a broken file, not your work. Run the tap test on a phone, where dead links feel twice as rude.

The photo question, by region and honestly

It deserves its own section because the wrong answer here is market-specific and nobody tells juniors the rules out loud. US, UK, Canada, Australia: no photo, full stop — it's a discrimination liability the employer doesn't want, and it reads as someone who didn't know the norm. Mainland Europe is split: Germany and France still expect one on many CVs, though the trend is off. India is genuinely mixed — mass-recruiting IT services and most product companies parse text-only, while BPO, hospitality, retail, real estate, and acting roles still expect a headshot, and some older company forms ask outright. The rule that never fails: read the room, not the blog. If the industry you're entering openly uses photos, include a plain professional one; if the posting says "equal opportunity" and the ATS has a checkbox for it, don't. And whatever you do, the photo must never contain your contact details as pixels — a banner graphic with your email baked into it parses as an empty page, which is the quietest possible way to become uncontactable.

Personal details: marital status, DOB, father's name, and where they still live

The old Indian resume template — date of birth, marital status, nationality, religion, father's name, "languages known: English, Hindi" as a personal-details block — came from government forms and pension files, and it survives in family templates like a ghost. For private-sector applications today, none of it belongs on the resume; the companies that genuinely need DOB or marital status ask on their own forms after selection starts, with a legal reason attached. Listing them voluntarily does two things: it burns header space, and it hands unconscious-bias material to every human who reads you. The one exception class is the specific government or PSU form that demands it in the CV format they've published — when the form asks, answer the form, and keep a separate clean version for everyone else.

How headers break in parsers, section by section

Everything above has a machine consequence, so here's the failure catalog. A name inside a text box or image — parser returns blank name. Email only in the page header region — many systems skip headers and footers entirely, so the email vanishes. A two-column template where the name block wraps oddly — the parser stitches "Ananya Bengaluru" into the name field and the location never registers. Phone with unusual separators — stored broken, unreachable when the auto-dialer tries it. Table-based layout with the contact grid on the left — some orderings read the table cells in a spiral and your LinkedIn ends up filed under education. The fix for the entire genre: the header is plain stacked text in the main body, standard characters, readable left to right, and you verify by pasting the PDF into a free parser and reading back what the machine recorded. Highlight-your-email-with-the-mouse is the thirty-second version of the same test, and it's the highest-value half-minute of the whole job-search process.

A final pass: the five-second stranger test

Show your exported header to someone outside your field for five seconds, then ask three questions: what's my name, where would they send me an email, and what kind of job am I going for. All three answered — done; the header is working. Any miss — you have a specific fixable element, and it's never "add more design." The header is the cheapest real estate on the page and the only part guaranteed to be seen by every reader, machine and human, which is exactly why the boring version wins. Our resume tips article puts this header discipline inside the full page order; run both and the top of your document does its actual job — gets out of the way and lets the person through to the work.

Check the export

After you download, tap the phone number and LinkedIn link on a phone. If they don't work, fix the fields in the builder before you apply.