Resume Tips

Most resumes are not rejected because the candidate is unqualified. They are rejected because the resume made the reader work too hard, or because a parser could not read it, or because it said nothing a hundred other resumes did not also say.

The fixes below are ordered roughly by how much they move callback rates. None of them require you to be a better candidate — only to describe the candidate you already are more accurately.

Mirror the language of the job description

Applicant tracking systems rank you on how closely your wording matches the posting. They do not understand synonyms. If the advert asks for "stakeholder management" and your resume says "worked with cross-functional teams", a human would call those the same thing and the software will not.

Read the posting and pull out the ten or twelve phrases that carry the actual requirements. Then check each one against your resume. Where you have done the thing but described it differently, change your wording to theirs. Where you have not done it, leave it out — this is about vocabulary, not invention.

The role of keywords in resume optimisation covers how the ranking actually works.

Lead with achievements, and put numbers on them

A recruiter cannot tell the difference between two people who both "managed a team of eight". They can immediately tell the difference between one who reduced team turnover from 30% to 12% in a year and one who did not say.

Every bullet should answer one question: what changed because you were there? Numbers make that concrete — money saved, time cut, volume handled, error rates dropped, people retained. If you do not have exact figures, an honest estimate with a qualifier ("roughly 15%") beats no figure at all.

Where you genuinely have no metric, use scope instead: the size of the budget, the number of markets, the seniority of the people you influenced.

Showcasing your abilities properly goes deeper on this.

Get the length right

One page if you have under ten years of experience. Two if you have more. Very senior or academic profiles occasionally justify three, and almost nobody else does.

Length is usually a symptom rather than the disease. Resumes run long because they list duties — which are predictable from the job title anyway — instead of results. Cut every line a reader could have guessed from your role name, and the page count fixes itself.

The oldest roles need the least space. A job from fifteen years ago earns one line, not five bullets.

How long a resume should be has the research behind this.

Use a structure the parser can actually read

Most rejections at this stage are silent. The resume looked fine to you and arrived as garbage on the other side.

Keep to a single column. Multi-column layouts get read straight across both columns and turn your career into nonsense. Avoid text boxes, avoid putting anything that matters in headers and footers, and drop the graphical skill bars — parsers ignore them, and they communicate nothing precise even to humans.

Use conventional section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Creative alternatives like "Where I've Made An Impact" confuse the software's section detection for no gain.

Always submit real text. A resume exported as an image parses as an empty document.

Tailor the top third for each role

You do not need a new resume per application. You need a new top third.

The summary, the skills line, and the first two bullets of your most recent role are what get read before a decision is made. Those should speak directly to the posting in front of you. The rest of your history can stay untouched.

This is the difference between twenty applications that convert and two hundred that do not. Career changers need this most, because their relevance is never obvious from job titles alone.

Write a summary that says something

Most summaries are three lines of adjectives. "Results-driven professional with a proven track record of excellence" describes nobody and eliminates nothing.

A useful summary states what you are, your strongest piece of evidence, and what you are aiming at. Something like: payroll manager, eight years across manufacturing and retail, rebuilt a 900-person payroll after an ERP migration, looking for a lead role in a multi-site business.

Three sentences. Each one a fact a recruiter could verify.

Make the skills section earn its space

A list of thirty skills communicates that you cannot prioritise. Ten is plenty, and they should be the ten the posting asks for, in the posting's words.

Separate genuine tools and systems from vague human qualities. "SAP SuccessFactors, Power BI, advanced Excel" is checkable. "Team player, hard-working, detail-oriented" is what everyone writes, including the people who are none of those things.

If a skill matters, it should also appear as evidence somewhere in your experience. A skills section that contradicts the work history reads as padding.

Cut the words that signal nothing

Some phrases actively cost you credibility because they appear on every weak resume: "responsible for", "duties included", "hard-working", "think outside the box", "synergy".

Replace "responsible for" with the verb of what you actually did. "Responsible for the recruitment process" becomes "hired 40 people across three countries in eighteen months".

The test is simple. If the opposite of your sentence would be absurd — nobody claims to be lazy or bad with detail — the sentence is doing no work.

Keep the order and the dates honest

Reverse chronological remains the default for good reason: it is what readers and parsers both expect. Functional and skills-based formats are read as an attempt to hide something, and usually they are.

Show months as well as years. A resume showing only years reads as an attempt to blur a gap, even when there is no gap.

If you do have gaps, name them briefly and move on. "2024–2025: full-time caregiving" costs you one line and removes the question. An unexplained gap costs you the interview.

Proofread for consistency, not just spelling

Spellcheck catches the easy errors. It does not catch the ones that make a resume feel careless: dates formatted three different ways, tense shifting between roles, bullets that sometimes end in full stops and sometimes do not, two different fonts because something was pasted in.

Pick one convention for each and apply it everywhere. Past roles in past tense, current role in present. One date format. One bullet style.

Then read it once backwards, last line to first. It breaks the reading momentum that makes your own errors invisible.

Five mistakes that could cost you the job covers the ones that recur most.

Send the right file, named properly

PDF unless you are asked for Word. It preserves layout across every device and, contrary to advice that is now a decade out of date, modern parsers handle it fine.

Name the file the way a human would want it in a folder of four hundred: Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. Not CV_final_v7_USE_THIS.pdf, and not document.pdf.

If the application form has both a file upload and a text box, fill in both. Some systems only index the text box.

Get an outside opinion before you send it

You cannot proofread your own positioning. You know what you meant, so you read what you meant rather than what is on the page. Every experienced hiring manager has watched strong candidates get filtered out by a resume that made sense only to its author.

Give it to someone who does not know your work and ask them one question: from this page alone, what job should I get? If their answer is not the job you are applying for, the resume is not finished.

Fifteen pieces of resume advice you have not heard is worth a scan once the basics above are in place.