How to write a resume recruiters actually read

Your agent searches LinkedIn and applies with a resume tailored to each role.

A recruiter opens your resume, scans it for a few seconds and makes a call: read on, or move to the next one. That first look isn’t careless. It’s a fast, practised check for three things — what you do, how senior you are and whether you fit this role. If the answers aren’t on the first screen, the rest of the page rarely gets read.

This guide is about passing that check. It covers what recruiters look at first, a structure that works for almost any role, how to write bullets that prove something, how to get through applicant tracking systems (ATS) and the mistakes that quietly cost interviews. It’s long on purpose: a resume is the one document you’ll send a hundred times, so an hour spent on it pays back every week of the search.

Nothing here needs a designer or a template shop. A plain document, written well, beats a beautiful one that hides the point.

What recruiters look at first

Eye-tracking studies of recruiters keep finding the same pattern: they don’t read, they scan. The eye lands on the name, jumps to the current title and company, checks the dates, then drops down the left edge of the experience section looking for familiar words. Most of the decision is made on the top third of page one.

That gives you a clear brief. The top of your resume has to answer, in order:

• Who you are — your target title
• How senior you are — years, scope, team size
• Where you’ve done it — companies they’ll recognise
• What you achieved — one or two numbers

Everything else — education, tools, side projects — supports those four answers. It doesn’t replace them. If a recruiter has to hunt for your current role or guess your level, the resume has already lost.

A structure that survives the skim

You don’t need a creative layout. You need a predictable one, so the reader finds what they’re looking for exactly where they expect it. This order works for almost every role.

Header

Name, target title, city and how to reach you: email, phone and a LinkedIn link. No photo, no date of birth, no full address. The title line matters most — write the role you want, in the words the posting uses. “Product Designer”, not “Creative Problem Solver”.

Summary

Two or three lines, not a paragraph. Your level, your field and the one thing you’re known for: “Senior product designer with 7 years in fintech. Led the design system used by six product teams at a payments company.” Skip adjectives like “passionate” and “results-driven” — they take space and prove nothing.

Experience

Reverse chronological, most recent first. For each role: title, company, dates and three to six bullets. Spend most of your words on the last two or three roles; older jobs can shrink to a single line each.

Skills

A short, scannable list of the tools and methods the role asks for. Group them if it helps — “Design: Figma, prototyping, design systems” — but don’t rate yourself with stars or bars. Nobody knows what four stars out of five in Figma means.

Education and the rest

Degree, school, year. Certificates, languages and selected projects go here too, briefly. If you’re early in your career, education can move above experience; otherwise it lives at the bottom.

Write bullets that prove something

Most resumes describe duties: “Responsible for onboarding”, “Worked on the checkout flow”. Duties tell the reader what you were supposed to do. They don’t tell them whether you did it well. A good bullet shows a result.

A simple formula works for almost every bullet: action + what you did + the result, ideally with a number.

Before: Responsible for the onboarding flow.

After: Redesigned onboarding for 40k new users a month, lifting activation from 31% to 44%.

Not every result has a clean metric. When it doesn’t, use scope instead: how many users, teams, markets or engineers your work touched. “Ran research with 24 customers across three markets” is concrete even without a percentage.

Start each bullet with a strong verb — led, shipped, cut, grew, launched, rebuilt — and keep it to one or two lines. If a bullet needs three lines, it’s two bullets. If it could appear on anyone’s resume, it needs a number or a name.

Tailor it to every job

A single generic resume sent to fifty roles feels efficient, but it’s the slowest way to get interviews. Each posting uses its own language, and both recruiters and ATS software look for that language. Tailoring doesn’t mean rewriting everything. It means three small edits per application.

1. Match the title

   Use the posting’s job title in your header and summary, as long as it honestly describes what you do.

2. Mirror the keywords

   Pick the five to ten skills the posting repeats and make sure each one appears in your experience, in the same words.

3. Reorder the bullets

   Move the most relevant results to the top of each role, so the first thing the reader sees is the thing this job needs.

Never add skills you don’t have. The goal is to describe your real experience in the employer’s words, not to borrow theirs. An interviewer will ask about every line.

Get through the ATS

Most companies run applications through an applicant tracking system before a person sees them. The software parses your file into fields — name, titles, dates, skills — and ranks you against the posting. If it can’t read your resume, it doesn’t matter how good it is.

• One column, top to bottom
• Standard headings: Experience, Skills, Education
• No tables, text boxes or icons for key text
• Dates in one consistent format
• Real text, not text inside images
• A PDF named Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf

Two-column templates are the most common trap. They look tidy to a person, but many parsers read straight across both columns and scramble your job titles into your skills. If you love a design, keep it for your portfolio.

Length and format

One page is right for most people with less than ten years of experience. Two pages are fine after that, as long as page one stands on its own. Nobody reads page three.

Use one clean font at 10–12 points, consistent spacing and enough white space that the sections separate at a glance. Bold sparingly — titles and maybe one number per role. If everything is bold, nothing is.

Save and send as PDF unless the posting asks for something else. It keeps your layout intact on every screen and every system.

Mistakes that cost interviews

Most rejected resumes aren’t bad. They make small, avoidable mistakes that make the reader’s job harder.

Before you hit send

Run this check every time. It takes half a minute and catches most of the problems above.

• The title matches the job
• Top three skills are in the first half
• Every bullet has a number or a scope
• One page, or two strong ones
• One column, real text, no tables
• Saved as PDF with your name

Frequently asked questions