How to write a resume that survives a six-second skim

A first-pass resume read takes a few seconds and answers one question: does this person plausibly do the job we are hiring for? Everything below is in service of making that answer obvious fast.

The shape

Order sections by what makes your case fastest. For nearly everyone with work experience:

• Name and contact — name, email, phone, city, and one link that is worth clicking. In the body, never in a page header.
• Summary — two or three lines. Optional, and only worth including if it is specific.
• Work History — reverse chronological. The heart of the document.
• Skills — concrete tools and capabilities, no self-rated star bars.
• Education — brief, and near the bottom once you have a few years of experience.
• Projects — promote it above Work History if your work history is thin and your projects are not.

Students and recent graduates invert this: Education and Projects go first, because that is where the evidence is.

Bullets: the only part that really matters

Most resume bullets describe duties. Duties are inferable from the job title and tell a reader nothing. The version that works states what changed because you were there.

The pattern underneath: what you did → how → what measurably changed. Lead with a real verb, not "responsible for" or "helped with". Put a number in wherever one honestly exists — magnitude, percentage, time, money, headcount, volume.

If nothing was measured, scope still carries information: "for 40 stores across three regions", "on a team of four", "in a codebase of 200k lines". Do not invent numbers. A specific unmeasured claim beats a fabricated measured one, and fabrications collapse in the interview.

How much to write per role

• Current or most recent role: four to six bullets.
• The one before: three or four.
• Older roles: one or two, or just the line with title, employer and dates.
• More than ~12 years back: a single "Earlier: Title, Employer (2008–2013)" line, or nothing.

Cut these

• "References available upon request." Universally assumed. It is a wasted line.
• Objective statements. "Seeking a challenging role where I can grow" describes every applicant alive.
• Skill rating bars. Self-assessed and uncalibrated; your four stars and mine are different numbers.
• Your full street address. City and region is enough, and safer.
• Photos, age, marital status — in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Employers frequently discard photo resumes to avoid bias-claim exposure. (Norms differ in parts of Europe and Asia — follow local convention.)
• Soft-skill adjectives with no evidence. "Detail-oriented team player" is claimed by everyone, including the people it is not true of.
• Every job you have ever held. A resume is an argument, not an archive.

Tailoring, cheaply

Rewriting from scratch for every application is unsustainable, and you will stop doing it by the fourth posting. The cheap version that captures most of the benefit:

• Reorder your skills so the ones in the posting come first.
• Swap two or three bullets in your most recent role for the ones closest to the job description.
• Adjust the summary’s opening line to name the role you are applying for.

That is ten minutes, not ninety, and it is what separates a resume that reads as aimed from one that reads as broadcast.

Length, honestly

One page under roughly ten years of experience. Two pages beyond it, or in academia and research where a CV runs longer still. Three pages is almost always an editing problem rather than an experience problem.

When you are one stubborn line over, fix it with the spacing density and margins before you cut a good bullet. Compact density and the Compact theme exist precisely for that moment.

Before you send it

• Read it aloud. Every awkward phrase surfaces immediately.
• Check dates for gaps and overlaps you did not intend.
• Confirm the phone number and email are correct — this fails more often than anyone admits.
• Name the file Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. Not resume-final-v3.pdf.
• Select-all, copy and paste into a text editor to confirm it extracts in reading order.
• Have one other person read it. You cannot proofread your own writing after the fifth pass.

Write a resume: step by step

1. Choose the section order. Lead with the strongest evidence — Work History for experienced candidates, Education and Projects for students.
2. Write outcome-led bullets. For each role, state what you did, how, and what measurably changed. Lead with a real verb and include a number wherever one honestly exists.
3. Weight recent roles heavily. Give your current role four to six bullets and taper to a single line for jobs more than a decade old.
4. Cut the filler. Remove objective statements, skill rating bars, "references available upon request", and unevidenced soft-skill adjectives.
5. Tailor in ten minutes. Reorder skills to match the posting, swap two or three bullets toward the job description, and name the role in the summary.
6. Proofread and export. Read it aloud, verify dates and contact details, export a PDF named Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, and confirm the text extracts in reading order.

Frequently asked questions

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