Writing better resumes (for Foreign Service Officers and other State Department employees)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a primer on private-sector jobs for Foreign Service Officers and other State Department folks. That prompted a few requests for advice on resumes and specific searches. Like my last piece, this isn’t an exhaustive guide. It’s a set of specific suggestions for people coming out of the Department.

Most of these suggestions come back to the person reading your resume. A hiring manager outside government reads it with the vocabulary and expectations of their own industry, so your job is to make your experience clear in those terms without claiming it’s something it isn’t.

Write a two-page resume

Senior Foreign Service Officers are used to keeping their resumes to about a page, while most civil servants are used to the federal resume that runs five pages or more. The federal resume changed last year. Since September 27, 2025, USAJOBS has limited resumes to two pages, with longer resumes disqualifying you from consideration. Two pages is now the norm inside government and common outside as well.

Use your actual titles

I made the case in the primer for using your actual titles rather than translating them into corporate equivalents. There are rare cases where translating makes sense, but most of the time it’s more likely to generate confusion or mistakes. A translated title also implies the corporate job description that goes with it. The duties we have in government don’t resemble what a hiring manager would expect from, say, an SVP, such as P&L responsibility or business development. By translating your titles, you invite hiring managers to judge you by the wrong (corporate) metrics rather than making them curious about the different skills you bring. You also create the risk that you’ll just get it wrong, with a translation that doesn’t make sense.

Spell out the jargon

Keeping your titles doesn’t mean use Department jargon, though. Our acronyms and terms – DCM, the Seventh Floor, taskers – don’t mean much to people on their own. Describe the work in plain words, too. “Wrote policy analysis to assist Ambassadors across Europe” tells a recruiter more than “drafted cables.” As always, spell out every acronym and, where you can, simply avoid using them in the first place. The same point goes for Department awards. You know what they mean, but most recruiters won’t know what a Superior Honor Award is or what it recognizes. Either say what it was for, or opt instead to describe the result in your bullets.

Report your scope accurately, and choose which numbers matter

Always detail what you were responsible for managing and at what level: the size of your team and the budget you managed. If appropriate, you can include the level and types of contacts you worked with. On the contact level, be prepared to substantiate it if you say “cabinet ministers and CEOs,” because interviewers often ask, and they ask early.

On my own resume, each management job opens with a short scope statement like this:

Led organizational transformation across the State Department’s $1.5-billion, 4,500-person public diplomacy operation. Responsible for strategic planning, resource allocation, performance management, and introducing new approaches to workforce development and technology integration. Oversaw 11 teams, 240 staff, and $75 million in operations.

This lays out where my job fit in, the size of the organization I worked in, and the work I oversaw directly. The same approach works for a civil servant. A GS-15 office director might write something like this:

Directed one of six offices in a 400-person State Department bureau. Led 35 staff, including three division chiefs, and managed a $12 million annual budget.

Both statements give two sets of numbers, the size of the organization and what the writer ran directly, and both sets are accurate. Choosing which numbers lead matters because bigger isn’t always better. There’s a temptation to make all of the numbers as big as possible, and the federal government offers numbers that few employers can match: multibillion-dollar programs and large staffs. With interagency detailees plus locally employed and security staff, a large embassy can easily have a thousand employees or more.

Think about how this might look from a hiring manager’s perspective. You have been an Ambassador and led a 1,000-person operation. You have probably had support staff for the last 10 years. Can you adapt to a young company where HR and procurement are one person and nobody has a private office?

Be thoughtful about what sort of jobs you’re going after and which numbers send the right signal: that you can lead at the right scale, without suggesting you’ve outgrown the role and would be a poor fit or hard to manage. For a senior role at a large firm, I’d leave my scope statement as written. For a smaller company, I’d lead with what I ran directly and put the larger organization second, using the same numbers:

Oversaw 11 teams, 240 staff, and $75 million in operations within the State Department’s $1.5-billion, 4,500-person public diplomacy operation.

Focus on outcomes, not outputs

One short scope statement per job is enough to show the breadth of your role. Use the rest of the space on what you accomplished, not how you did it. What agreements did you secure? What were the results of your public diplomacy campaigns? How did the development programs you managed affect the host country population?

A lot of the Department’s work doesn’t produce a clean metric, and that’s fine. When you don’t have a number, describe the change: what exists now that didn’t before, what finally happened after a long delay, or who acts differently because of your work. Two lines from my own resume work this way:

Brokered an agreement with the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community to coordinate global information support operations.

Obtained funding and put the National Museum of American Diplomacy on track to open to the public after a 10-year delay. Negotiated the first Congressional authorization for the Museum in its 25-year history.

List your security clearance

If you hold a clearance at the time of your departure, list the level. If you haven’t departed yet (or just did), you should be explicit that your clearance is active. Active clearances are particularly valuable for government contractors, because it spares an employer the months a new investigation takes before you can do classified work. That said, a clearance can generally be reinstated without a new investigation for about two years after you leave. After that, a new employer has to sponsor a new investigation (though reinvestigations of this type often move quickly). Regardless, best to move fast if you plan to keep doing cleared work.

Wrapping up

Diplomats spend much of their daily lives thinking about how a foreign audience will hear what they say. In a lot of ways, this isn’t meaningfully different: you have to convey things with a new audience that often has different cultural norms, expectations, and perspectives than you are used to. As you think about all of the above advice, keep that in mind: how would this land for an audience that looks very different from you?

There’s more to talk about on the search process and interviews, but those will need to be a separate piece.