One page, no photo, no personal details

A US resume is Letter size, one page for up to about ten years of experience, and carries no photo, date of birth, marital status or full street address. Include your name, city and state, phone, email and LinkedIn URL. Anything else in the header is a reason for a compliance-minded employer to set the resume aside.

Skip the objective statement. A three-sentence summary that states your license, years of experience, the size of company you worked in and what you own in the close does the job better.

Put your CPA status where the ATS will find it

For most corporate accounting roles the first keyword the system checks is "CPA". Put it next to your name in the header and again in the summary, with the state of licensure. If you are still in the process, write "CPA candidate" and add how many sections you have passed and when you expect to finish; recruiters treat a candidate with two sections passed very differently from someone who has not started.

The same applies to a CMA, EA or CIA and to the 150 credit hours if you are applying for entry-level roles at a firm. List the degree with the school and graduation year; a GPA only matters for recent graduates, and only above 3.5.

Describe the close, not "responsibility for accounting"

"Responsible for month-end close and general ledger" appears on thousands of resumes and does not distinguish a staff accountant from a controller. The hiring manager wants the scope: how many entities, how many days, which areas you owned and which you supported.

• Number of legal entities and currencies, and the revenue or asset size of the business.
• Days to close and whether you shortened it, for example "cut close from 10 to 6 business days".
• Areas you owned outright: cash, prepaids, accruals, fixed assets, intercompany, revenue recognition under ASC 606, leases under ASC 842.
• Reconciliations per month and how variances were resolved.
• Audit work: Big 4 or regional firm, PBC lists, number of requests, and the outcome ("no material adjustments in three years").
• Controls: SOX documentation and testing, IPO readiness, segregation of duties.

Name the ERP and the level of Excel

Systems are the second keyword group the ATS matches and a real switching cost for the employer. Write out NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, QuickBooks, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, BlackLine or FloQast, whichever you used, and say what you did in them: entered journals, ran the close checklist, administered the system, built reports.

"Proficient in Excel" is on every resume. Pivot tables, XLOOKUP, Power Query, macros or data models tell the reader what you can do. If you have used SQL, Tableau or Power BI for reporting, list them; finance teams increasingly ask.

Quantify everything you can

Accounting is a numbers job, and a resume without numbers reads as though you did not track your own results. Every bullet should carry at least one figure: dollar volume, count of accounts or vendors, days saved, dollars recovered, percentage of variance resolved.

Start each bullet with a verb and end it with the outcome. "Reconciled 25 bank and credit card accounts monthly and resolved 100% of variances before close" is one line, and it says more than a paragraph about attention to detail.

Common mistakes on accountant resumes

These are the reasons a qualified candidate does not get past the first screen.

• CPA status buried in a certifications section on page two, or missing altogether while the candidate is licensed.
• Duties copied from the job posting instead of results with numbers.
• No system names, so the ATS cannot match "NetSuite" and the manager cannot judge ramp-up time.
• Two-column templates, text boxes and icons that come out scrambled in the applicant tracking system. Use a single column.
• Gaps left unexplained. A line such as "Career break, 2021, family care" is enough and removes the question.
• "References available upon request" and an objective statement, both of which waste the space a summary should use.