Where your résumé actually goes
Almost every guide to this assumes one thing: that you make a file and send it. We checked the four platforms and that is true of two of them.
This matters more than a formatting tip, so we put it first. The document you build is not treated the same way by the places you submit through. On one of them it is a file. On another it is not a file at all.
What Spotlight actually asks for
If the form is where your credits really live, the sensible thing is to build the document out of the same pieces the form wants.
Spotlight’s own guidance on credits is unusually relaxed about this. “The only mandatory field is the credit/production name, and other fields can be left blank.” Then it asks for more anyway: “Include as much information as possible, including your role, the production’s name, year, company and director.”
Build every credit line in your document out of those five things, in that order. Production, role, year, company, director. Then filling in the form is transcription rather than remembering, and the paper version and the uploaded version say the same thing as the profile.
How to group the credits
The commonest formatting mistake is not ugliness. It is putting everything in one block and making the reader sort it.
Marci Liroff is worth listening to here, and we should say plainly that the advice is from 2022 rather than this year. She cast E.T., Footloose and Mean Girls, and she sits on the national board of the Casting Society. Her rule is to keep the categories apart — film, television and new media as separate headings, rather than one long list of everything you have done.
A casting director looking for a television actor is scanning for television credits. If your best television credit is buried between two short films, they have to do the sorting you did not do.
Spotlight builds this in — the profile has headings you organise credits under, so the platform is already assuming the split.
Put the strongest category first. The order of your headings is an argument about what kind of actor you are.
One honest caveat about currency. We looked hard for a casting director or agent writing about résumé format in the last two years and found nobody. The named advice in this field is from 2022 and earlier, and everything more recent is unsigned content on résumé-builder websites. That is worth knowing when anybody tells you the rules have changed.
The commercials line, and why it is written that way
Standard practice is to write “Commercials: conflicts available upon request” and list nothing. Almost nobody explains what that sentence is protecting you from.
It is not modesty and it is not saving space. Commercial contracts create product-category exclusivity. Book a car advert and you are barred from other car adverts for as long as that one runs. Those exclusions are the conflicts.
The three columns that stop a screen reader working
We went looking for anybody in casting who had written about whether an actor’s résumé can be read by assistive technology. There is nothing. Not a union, not a platform, not a casting body.
Here is why that silence matters. The conventional acting résumé is three columns — role, production, director — lined up with tab stops. That looks like a table. To a computer it is not one.
Tab stops and spaces are spacing instructions. They carry no information about which things belong together. The columns exist only in the eye of somebody looking at the page.
A screen reader has nothing to go on, so it reads straight across in the order the text was typed. Three unrelated columns come out as one run-on line, and the link between a role and the production it was in is gone.
A real table is different. It has header cells, so the reader can announce each row as role, then production, then director.
The accessibility term for a document that carries this structure is a tagged file. The plain-English definition comes from WebAIM, who have been the standard reference on this for two decades: “When people talk about ‘accessible’ PDF files, they are usually referring to ‘tagged’ PDF files… This information supports assistive technologies.”
The printed copy, and how much of the advice is American
There is a precise, confident ritual for attaching a résumé to a headshot. It is real, it is quoted verbatim below, and no British source we could find describes anything like it.
The American instruction is from Backstage, last updated in September 2023, and it is exact. Résumés should be cut down or printed on matching eight-by-ten paper, and then: “You should staple your headshot to your résumé on all four corners, with the staples positioned a quarter of an inch away from the photo’s edges. Staple them together with the headshot facing up, so that the staples’ pinchers are visible on the résumé side.”
Where do the staples go?
BackstageAll four corners, a quarter of an inch in.
A university theatre guide“Add staples in each of the four corners or at the top and bottom.”
What we foundA real disagreement, but a softer one than it is usually reported as. Nobody higher up has settled it, and one of the sources treats both as fine.
What about tape?
Casting Frontier, 2023Staple or carefully glue. “Avoid using tape, which may damage your photos or look unprofessional.”
What we foundVerified verbatim, and the only piece of this advice with an obvious practical reason behind it.
Does anybody still want paper? Less than they did, and not nowhere. Backstage’s British guide says plainly that “generally, actors don’t have to post their CVs now”, while noting that casting directors will often print them anyway. The exception is theatre. For open theatre auditions, and American Equity principal auditions specifically, bringing a hard copy is still described as standard.
If you do need to trim one, there is a trick worth knowing, and we will be honest about where it comes from. Left-align the text first, and you only have to make two cuts — the right edge and the bottom — instead of measuring four. That is from a low-grade advice blog rather than an industry source. It is also obviously correct, which is why it is here.
Why the general résumé websites get this wrong
We wanted to argue that generic careers advice is actively harmful to actors. Half of that argument survived contact with the evidence.
Indeed’s actor résumé guide, updated in June, really does say to include “the names of any well-known or reputable directors or professional references you have in your network.” Their own example template goes further and prints a References block, with two industry names and their personal email addresses.
Grading the sources
This page needed one correction to its premise and one to a named expert, which is roughly the usual rate.
Two things we deliberately did not state. We found no published file-size limit for a résumé document on any of the four platforms, so we are not inventing one. And there is no named casting voice on this subject from the past two years anywhere we could find, which we would rather report than paper over.
Where we differ from the standard account
Is your résumé a file you upload?
Commonly saidYes. Make a PDF and attach it everywhere.
What we foundOn two of four platforms. On Spotlight there is no upload at all, and the credits are database fields.
Should you use tab stops for the columns?
Commonly saidYes, that is how the layout is done.
What we foundIt destroys the document for a screen reader. Use a real table with a header row instead.
Do you staple at four corners?
Commonly saidYes, a quarter of an inch in, always.
What we foundThat is American practice. No British casting source describes any stapling method at all.
Is a British CV eight by ten or A4?
Commonly saidTreated as a paper size argument.
What we foundIt is not one. The photo is ten by eight and the CV is A4. Different objects.
Should you list your commercials?
Commonly saidWrite conflicts available on request, without saying why.
What we foundThe reason is category exclusivity. Naming brands lets somebody cut you over a conflict that expired.
Do you still need printed copies?
Commonly saidAlways carry them.
What we foundMostly not, in Britain. Theatre auditions are the live exception and they are named as such.
Are the rules changing?
Commonly saidImplied constantly by new articles.
What we foundNo named casting professional has written about résumé format since 2022. The new articles are unsigned.
Do one thing tonight. Open your résumé and check whether the columns are a real table or just tab stops, because that is a five-minute change you can make once and never think about again. Then copy the five fields into your Spotlight credits, in the same order, so the profile and the page finally agree.