How to write a résumé that gets interviews

Start with the order recruiters read in

A hiring manager reads top to bottom and stops when they lose interest, so the strongest evidence belongs highest on the page. For most professionals that order is: contact details, a three-line summary, experience, skills, then education.

Career changers and recent graduates flip two of those: skills and projects move above experience, because relevance matters more than chronology when your last title does not match the target role.

• Contact block: name, target title, city, email, phone, one link.
• Summary: role plus years, best quantified result, what you are looking for.
• Experience: newest first, three to five bullets per role.
• Skills: tools and methods, ranked by relevance to the posting.

Write bullets as results, not responsibilities

"Responsible for managing the onboarding funnel" tells a reader what you were assigned. "Rebuilt the onboarding funnel, lifting week-one activation from 31% to 48%" tells them what changed because you were there.

A reliable pattern is action verb, what you did, and the measurable outcome. If you genuinely have no number, use scale instead: team size, budget, number of markets, volume of tickets.

• Led, shipped, reduced, negotiated, rebuilt, automated - strong openers.
• Aim for a number in at least half of your bullets.
• Keep each bullet to one or two lines so the page stays scannable.

Make it survive the applicant tracking system

Most mid-size and large employers parse your file before a person sees it. Parsers are simple: they want real text, standard section headings, and recognisable dates.

That does not mean your résumé has to be ugly. It means the text lives in text, not inside an image, and the headings say Experience rather than "Where I've Left My Mark".

• Export a text-based PDF, not a screenshot or a flattened image.
• Use conventional headings: Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.
• Spell out tools the way the posting spells them, then add the acronym.
• Avoid text inside headers, footers, or graphics.

Tailor per application, not per season

The single highest-return habit in a job search is a fifteen-minute tailoring pass: reorder bullets so the most relevant win leads, swap in the posting's vocabulary, and adjust the summary line to name the role.

Keeping one master résumé per career direction, then tailoring copies, is far faster than rewriting from scratch - and it stops your history drifting into inconsistency across applications.