Do You Need Your Address on your Resume?

In the modern era is it still required that you put your address on your resume? Isn’t that an outdated concept? Well, no.

The fact is that most jobs are still in person and the employer or recruiter wants to know where you are. They prefer not to deal with people who live out of state and are either seeking a remote role or want to get a job then move to the city.

What employers and therefore recruiters want is someone who already lives near the office and is ready to work.

That’s why it’s so important to have your address on your resume.

Do You Still need to Put your Address on your Resume?

As stated above, yes, it’s still important to put your address on your resume. However, you might have some leeway if you are concerned about privacy. I will touch on this below when I discuss if you need to put your entire address on your cv.

The other thing to remember is that it benefits you to have your address on your resume. The reason that you want your address on your resume is that it is something that recruiters use when searching resume databases on places like Indeed and other databases open to recruiters.

For instance, if a recruiter is in need of an executive assistant for a Midtown Manhattan company, they will do a search of resumes with Manhattan as a key term. They might also then expand the search to include resumes where the people are within x number of miles.

If your resume ends up in the hands of a recruiter who is working on a job outside of your location, then it’s of no use to you or them. It’s simply a waste of time.

So, in an effort to avoid that, simply haver your address on your resume. If you’re hesitant about listing your full adddress, rest assured you don’t have to. We’ll cover how to handle that in a later section.

Why Include Your Address on your resume?

Ok, so why exactly would you want to include your address on your resume? Well, let’s put it in bullet points:

• You Want A Recrutier or Hiring Manager To Know You Live Nearby
• Your Address is impressive (aka Manhattan Beach or Bel Air, SoHo or Upper East Side, Wicker Park or Lincoln Park).

But that’s basically it. You have no real reason to want your address other than those reasons.

A recruiter or the hiring manager at the company that you’re sending your resume to doesn’t really care exactly where you live. They do care that you live in the area.

There is a somewhat bothersome tactic that people use when they want to move to a new city. What these people do is list their new city on their resume but still haven’t moved there.

For instance:

Jane lives in Ohio and wants to move to Mahattan. She doesn’t have an apartment in Manhattan, or NYC anywhere. She doesn’t have a job in NYC yet. So what Jane does is create a new resume and list a Manhattan zip code on her resume and lists that she’s living in Manhattan.

Jane does this because she knows that recrutiers and hiring managers don’t want to hire people outside of the area they live. However, what Jane doesn’t realzie is that this is more often than not going to backfire and cause her to not get the job or not even be considered.

The better approach would be to leave off her address and send out her resumes to headhunters, recrutiers, and job hiring maangers. Be honest and upfront. The more deception on your resume, or on your part, the more likely it is that you’re going to have a negative experience.

As a general rule, it’s better to not lie on your resume if you don’t absolutely have to.

Should You Have Your Full Address on your Resume?

As a general rule, I would advise listing your entire full address on your resume. There is simply no need to list your full address.

The better approach would be to simply list the city you live in, and your zip code. Nothing else is needed.

With that information, a recrutier can determine if you live close enough to the location to be a viable employee.

The simple fact is that unless you work in the medical field, it does matter where you live.

Nurses are flown around the country and housed at the hospitals expense (and in the majority of cases this is a taxpayer funded program, so there is unlimited government funds for Nurses). However, other careers do not afford people the ability to travel at their emopoloyers expense whenever they feel like it.

For example, this article describes a woman who is being paid $120 an hour and flown around the country and put up in hotels. This situation does not apply to the average person, it’s only for Nurses.

So, unless you’re a Nurse, you will need to be creative and selective when creating a resume.

The advice here is to just list your city and zip code on your resume.