How to Write Your Sorority Recruitment Resume

Updated: May 27 2025

Your sorority resume is a one-pager that chapters look at before recruitment even starts—and some alumnae writing recommendation letters will ask for a copy too. Here's what to put on it, how to format it, and how to get it done.

From our Sorority Recruitment Guide.

In this post: What's in a Sorority Resume | Too Much? Not Enough? | Design & Formatting | Dos and Don'ts

What Is a Sorority Resume—And How Is It Different?

A sorority resume—also called a social resume—is a one-page document potential new members (PNMs) submit as part of a sorority recruitment application. Some schools have you fill out form fields online; others ask for a resume upload; some ask for both. In some cases, alumnae writing recommendation letters will also request a copy to include with their submissions. Either way, the goal is to give chapters a snapshot of who you are before recruitment even starts.

Unlike a job application, your sorority resume is read by active chapter members who are trying to figure out if you'd be a good fit for their sisterhood. That calls for different content and a different approach than a professional resume. Personal interests, hobbies, and all of your activities outside school are fair game here—and sometimes they're the most memorable parts. Shared interests create real connections during recruitment conversations, and those connections matter.

The other difference is tone. A professional resume is formal and stripped down. A sorority resume can have personality—in how it's designed, in how you describe your activities, in what you choose to include. You're not applying for a job. You're introducing yourself to people you might spend the next four years with.

→ Not sure how a resume fits into the overall application process? How to Apply for Sorority Recruitment has the full picture.

What Goes on a Sorority Resume

Treat it like a highlight reel, not your entire life story. Most sorority resumes follow a similar structure, roughly in this order:

Contact information. Your name, phone number, email address, and school. If you have it, use your new school email address—not partybeast@gmail.com.
Academic information. Your high school, graduation year, GPA, and any AP, honors, or college classes you've taken. If you're a sophomore, junior, or transfer student going through recruitment, include your college GPA and activities too.
Honors and awards. Awards and recognition in any area—winning a regional debate tournament, making Honor Roll, earning a black belt, volunteer recognition, placing in a state art competition.
Extracurricular activities and leadership. Sports teams, clubs, student government, theater, band, dance, choir, competitive teams of any kind—and any leadership roles you've held. If you were a captain, an officer, or an editor, say so.
Community service and volunteer work. List the organization and what you actually did—walked dogs at the animal shelter, organized a church holiday bazaar, packed meals for a local nonprofit. You don't need to go further than that here. That said, if you did something major—founded the organization, raised a significant amount of money, or received an award for your work—include more detail.
Work experience. Keep it simple: job title, employer, and dates. You don't need to list responsibilities—the point is just to show that you work. Babysitting, retail, food service, internships—it all counts. But if you were promoted, managed other people, handled money, or took on anything that sounds like it could double as a sorority exec role—treasurer, scheduler, trainer—add a short line for that.
Skills and interests. Languages, instruments, coding, ceramics, competitive chess, training for a marathon, DJing, developing film—the more specific, the better. This is the section that makes you a person instead of a list of credentials.

Each category becomes a labeled section header with bullet points underneath. Not every section will apply to you, and that's fine—skip what doesn't fit and fold thin sections together if needed. These are categories to draw from, not a required checklist. You want this to fit on one page—if Fortune 500 CEOs can fit their resume on one page, you can, too. Prioritize the areas where you're most accomplished.

How those sections look—fonts, layout, color—is where many PNMs spend way too much time. More on that next.

Too Much? Not Enough?

If you're struggling to fit everything on one page, the answer isn't a smaller font—it's editing. Your sorority resume doesn't need to be a complete record of everything you've ever done. Think about what you actually want members to know about you before they even meet you. If you can identify two or three things—your leadership, your commitment to service, your creative work—let those lead and cut the rest. A captain role on your varsity team says more than five clubs you attended twice.

If you're staring at a half-empty page, you probably have more than you think—it just doesn't feel impressive yet. Babysitting regularly since you were 15 is work experience. Teaching yourself to edit video is a skill. Learning sign language is an interesting detail. The skills and interests section especially rewards specificity over prestige—a chapter member will remember a PNM who photographs Great Danes or plays competitive chess. And a leaner resume isn't automatically a problem. Chapters are looking for fit, not volume.

Design & Formatting

The resume design should highlight your strongest qualities. The goal is a layout that's easy to read and has a little personality, without getting in the way of your actual content. There is a bar here—a completely unstyled document can look low-effort when other PNMs are submitting something considered and put-together—but the bar isn't high. Clean and polished is the target, not elaborate.

Canva is a popular tool for building a sorority resume, and there are plenty of good templates to start from. Google Docs and Word work just as well.

If design isn't your thing, keep it simple: a straightforward template, readable fonts, and consistent formatting will get you there. If you love design, that's great—just remember that chapters review a lot of resumes, and something that's hard to read might get skipped.

Fonts. Stick to two at most—one for headers, one for body text. Avoid anything so decorative it slows the reader down. Script fonts for your name can work; Playlist for your entire resume does not.
Color. One accent color is enough—colored headings or section dividers, not a hot pink background with white text.
Images. Skip them. Decorative photos and icons are a distraction from your content, and they tend to look cheesy. Your design elements—color, fonts, layout—are enough.
White space. Don't try to fill every inch of the page. Margins and spacing make a resume easier to read, not lazier-looking.
What to avoid. Heavy floral borders, watercolor washes behind body text, overlapping text boxes, and designs that push your font size down to fit everything in. If you're squinting at your own resume, so is everyone else.

Dos and Don'ts

Do:

Start early. Write your resume and then come back to it a few days later to add things you might have forgotten or tighten up some phrasing.
Proofread. Run spellcheck, then read it again yourself. Spellcheck misses things.
Ask someone to review it. A parent, a friend, a college counselor—everyone misses things in their own writing. You might want to run it through AI with a prompt like "This is my sorority resume I'm submitting as part of the application process. Read it as if you're a sorority member and tell me your impressions."
Be specific. Especially in activities and service. "Volunteered at an animal shelter" is forgettable. "ASPCA dog walker and kennel assistant" is not.
Include part-time and summer jobs. Babysitting, lifeguarding, working a register—paid work represents responsibility and commitment.

Don't:

Exaggerate or lie. It's not worth it.
Include everything you've ever done. Edit down to what's actually meaningful. If you're not proud of it or it doesn't say anything about you, cut it. Overwhelming the reader is the last thing you want during recruitment.
Go back before high school. The exception is something truly exceptional—ranking on the USTA Junior Circuit or winning the National Spelling Bee.
Include your social media handles unless they're directly tied to an accomplishment, like an award-winning photography account.
Use slang. Overly casual language and jargon that not everyone would understand don't work here.

File & Submission Tips

Save your resume as a PDF. It preserves your formatting across every device and operating system—what looks perfect on your laptop can fall apart if someone opens a .docx file on a different computer.

Name your file clearly. Use your school's application specified format, or if there isn't one, go with something like Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. Avoid generic titles, version numbers, or anything that looks like a draft (like resume-v3-momnotes.pdf).

Follow instructions. Check how your school's application requests the file be submitted and do exactly that. Most have you upload your resume along with your headshot and other materials.

→ Your sorority resume is one piece of a larger application process. For everything else you need to pull together before recruitment starts, Sorority Recruitment Guide has it all in one place.

More sorority advice:
→ How to Apply for Sorority Recruitment
→ Recommendation Letters for Sorority Recruitment
→ What Is Sorority Recruitment—And What Actually Happens?
→ How to Make Your Sorority Recruitment Video