The Best Combination Resume To Get You Hired

Benefits of a Combination Resume

A combination resume, also known as a hybrid resume, is a blend of a functional resume and a chronological resume. This type of resume describes your work history to show relevance but also details your specific competencies to display your areas of expertise.

A hybrid resume starts with a summary of your most powerful abilities. This section helps highlight your abilities, even when you have very little work experience. Let’s say someone has graphic design experience but no proven achievements involving logo creation. They could discuss logo projects and personal work in the skills section.

Then, a combination resume goes into a short work experience section. This probably won’t be as detailed as the work history section in a chronological resume, but will still provide the recruiter with tangible accomplishments to show your real world experience.

These resumes provide ample opportunity to discuss all of your major strengths, giving recruiters a complete image of your professional qualifications.

When To Use a Combination Resume

A combination resume is an excellent format for showcasing your best abilities and providing a deep narrative of your career history. While it’s an excellent type of resume, it isn’t for everyone. The main professionals who benefit from a combination resume are:

• Junior professionals with one to three years of work experience
• Recent graduates with little to no work experience
• People changing careers and switching to a new field

Because this resume gives you room to discuss your skills and provide relevance and background, it’s useful for professionals without typical qualifications or an extensive work history. If you have over three years of standard job experience, we recommend you stick to the traditional, straightforward chronological resume.

Step-by-step guide: How to write a combination resume?

Let’s walk through some combination resume examples and learn how to assemble one – step-by-step. 

Think of this as a combination resume template you can reference anytime. Bookmark this page and return to it whenever you need it.

Header and contact information

This section is short and simple but vital to get right. Your resume header contains your name, job title, and contact details. It’s the first thing the recruiter sees and is their go-to reference when they want to get in touch, so make sure you include multiple contact methods and double-check them for spelling and accuracy.

Here’s a quick list of everything to include in your resume header:

• Full name
• Job title
• Email address
• Phone number
• Location (just city and state are fine)
• LinkedIn URL

While not every professional has a LinkedIn profile, we recommend creating one and including its link here. This profile is a great way to display your qualifications in greater detail and it’s yet another way to contact you (and many hiring managers love connecting over LinkedIn).

Resume summary or objective

A resume summary or objective is a two- to four-sentence description of your professional background. Typically, this summary highlights major achievements and standout skills to quickly grab the recruiter’s attention, encouraging them to read the rest of your resume.

To get you thinking, here’s a sample resume summary for a sales associate:

Note that summaries and objectives are slightly different. Summaries describe experience and achievements and are primarily for established professionals, while objectives are for people with little to no job experience. Review realistic samples of both summaries and objectives in our collection of resume examples.

Skills list

This section makes a combination resume unique. Unlike a typical Skills section, which is a simple bullet list, this section is more like a work experience section, with structured headers for each skill. Underneath each skill is a list of related achievements to reinforce and prove that skill. Here’s an example:

Remember that this isn’t a typical resume section, so you’ll need to use a flexible resume template to accommodate it comfortably.

Work experience

Your work history section will be almost identical to a standard chronological resume – provide your job title, the company name, its location, date of employment, and a list of accomplishments. The main difference is that you may only have room for one to two entries rather than the usual three to four.

When writing your accomplishments, make sure to add measurable metrics to show your positive outcomes on the company and provide tangible impact. Here’s an example:

Education

Add any educational degrees you possess, plus your graduation date, the institution where you received them, and your GPA (if it’s above 3.5). If you have space, include a bullet point or two highlighting achievements or honors.

It’s important to add only relevant details to your degrees. If you have a Bachelor’s degree in technology but are career switching to a marketing role, include just the basics—degree name, institution, and date.

If you have a college degree, it’s best to omit your high school diploma. However, if it’s your only education, include it like any other education using the method we described above.

Tips for a Successful Hybrid Resume

To finish up, let’s go over some top tips to build an impressive combination resume. Here are our best do’s and don’ts for your hybrid resume:

• Tailor your resume: Read through the job ad, look for relevant qualifications and keywords, and include them in your resume. This aligns you with the open role and is a great way to build an ATS resume.
• Include hard and soft skills: Add both hard and soft skills to your Skills section. Hard skills are traditionally more valued, but many positions need strong soft skills, and it pays to showcase them. For example, a nurse should highlight their keen emotional intelligence.
• Showcase real achievements: Both your Skills and Work experience sections should focus on real accomplishments and measurable metrics to add tangible meaning to your skills.
• Use action verbs: Start each bullet point with a powerful action verb relevant to your industry, such as “Collaborated,” “Led,” or “Performed.”
• Use a professional template: Take advantage of premade templates to save time and ensure professional formatting, structure, and white space.

“A combination resume is an excellent format for showcasing your best abilities and providing a deep narrative of your career history.”

Craft a combination resume that turns heads

A combination resume is the best of both worlds, displaying key skills and an impressive work history, and it’s easy to get started. Just remember our top tips:

• Use this format when you’re a junior professional, a recent graduate, or a person changing careers
• Write your Skills section like a work experience section, with bullet points under each skill header
• Include quantified, measurable achievements for both your Skills and Work experience sections
• List relevant skills and give them all due weight, including soft skills like emotional intelligence, patience, and time management

This isn’t the most typical type of resume, and you’ll need an adaptable program to create one, so try CVwizard’s resume maker. Our resume builder is endlessly flexible and customizable, so you can drag and drop sections and add unique elements wherever you need them.