Recruiters do not read your contact details. They scan them, copy one, and move on. So the only job of that little block at the top of your CV is to be instantly usable. When it is not, you do not get a polite email asking for clarification. You just do not get the call.
Most people overthink this section or, worse, paste it into a header image that no system can read. Let's fix both.
What to include, in order
Keep it to four or five lines, plain text, left-aligned or centered under your name. The essentials:
- Full name as a heading, slightly larger than the body text.
- Phone number with the country code if you are applying abroad (+44, +1, +33).
- A professional email address you actually check.
- City and country — not your full street address.
- One link: your LinkedIn URL, customized so it reads cleanly.
That is the whole list. Notice what is not on it.
What to leave off
Your full mailing address is a relic. Nobody is posting you a letter, and a precise street address mostly signals your commute distance, which can quietly work against you. City and country is enough.
Drop your date of birth, marital status, nationality, and a photo unless the local hiring norm expects them. In the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia, including any of these can introduce bias risk and some recruiters will skip a CV that has a photo for exactly that reason. In much of continental Europe a photo is still common, so this is one of the few rules that genuinely depends on where you are applying.
Also cut the word "Curriculum Vitae" as a title, the fax number, and the instant-messaging handles. They date you.
Pick an email that does not undercut you
Use firstname.lastname@ at a normal provider. If your name is taken, add a middle initial or a number that is not your birth year. The address you made at fifteen does not belong on a job application, and neither does your current work email, which tells your boss you are looking the moment you hit send on a forwarded message.
The mistake that gets you auto-rejected
Here is the one that quietly kills applications: putting your contact details inside an image, a text box, or the document's header and footer.
Many applicant tracking systems read the main text layer of a file and ignore everything else. If your phone and email live in a header, a sidebar graphic, or a designed banner, the parser can pull your work history and then have no idea how to reach you. A recruiter searching their database for your number finds a blank field. You can read more about why this happens in our guide on how applicant tracking systems work.
Keep the contact block as live, selectable text in the body of the document. Test it yourself: open your PDF, try to highlight your email with the cursor and copy it. If you can't, no machine can either.
A clean template
Here is a layout that survives both a six-second human scan and an ATS parser:
Jordan Rivera
+1 415 555 0142 · jordan.rivera@email.com
San Francisco, USA · linkedin.com/in/jordanrivera
Three lines. Everything copyable. No graphics, no fluff.
If you are building your CV from your LinkedIn profile, a tool like Postulit pulls these fields across as plain text automatically, so the contact block stays machine-readable from the start. For the rest of the document, our complete guide to writing a CV covers structure, wording and length.
Get the top three lines right and you have removed one of the most common reasons a strong candidate never hears back.