Your resume has two readers with opposite needs. Software wants plain, predictable structure it can parse into fields. A human wants to find the relevant thing fast without reading every line. Designs that impress neither are the ones built to look striking in a portfolio.
The structure
- Contact block: name, city and country, phone, email, one link. No photo, no date of birth, no full street address.
- A three-line summary naming your role, years of experience, and your two strongest relevant skills. Write it for the specific job.
- Experience in reverse chronological order, most recent first.
- Skills, grouped into two or three named categories rather than one long comma-separated run.
- Education, certifications, and anything genuinely relevant last.
One page for under ten years of experience, two pages beyond that. Beyond two pages you are asking for a favour nobody grants.
Formatting rules that exist for parsing reasons
- Single column. Multi-column layouts get read across the page and scramble your history.
- No text inside tables, text boxes, headers or footers — parsers commonly drop those regions entirely.
- No icons or images standing in for information. A phone icon with no label is invisible to software.
- Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Clever headings like "Where I've Made an Impact" defeat the section detection.
- One common typeface at 10 to 12 point, and dates written the same way everywhere, such as Mar 2023 – Present.
- Export as PDF unless the listing asks for a Word file, and name the file with your name and the role.
Write bullets that state a result
Most resume bullets describe a duty. Duties tell a reader what the job was; results tell them what you were like in it. The pattern that works is: strong verb, what you did, what changed, over what period.
Weak: "Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts." Stronger: "Ran four social accounts and grew combined following from 12k to 40k in ten months, lifting referral signups by 18 percent."
Tailor with the listing open
Read the job description and mark the requirements it repeats. Those exact terms should appear in your resume where they are true — in your summary, in your skills, and inside at least one bullet showing you used the skill. Mirror the employer's wording rather than your internal job title: if they say "customer success" and your company said "account management", write both.
The mistakes that cost the most
- One generic resume sent everywhere. It reads as generic to every reader.
- An objective statement about what you want. The summary should be about what you bring.
- Listing every job since school. Anything over fifteen years old can go, unless it is directly relevant.
- Unexplained gaps. A one-line entry such as "Career break — caregiving, 2024" closes the question.
- Typos in the first three lines, which is where every reader is paying most attention.
When you finish, read it once at arm's length for five seconds. If you cannot tell what job the person does and what they are good at in that time, the format is still in the way.