The six-second reality

Recruiters do not read your resume first — they scan it, in about six seconds, looking at your job titles, employers, dates, and a few bold numbers. If the scan looks relevant, they read properly. Your resume has one job: survive the scan and earn the read.

The structure that works

Header: name, job title, email, phone, city and state, LinkedIn if it is current. Summary: two or three sentences — years of experience, specialty, one standout metric. Experience: most recent first; three to five bullets per job. Skills: the tools and terms from the job posting that you genuinely have. Education: degree, school, year; move it to the top only if you graduated within the last two years.

Bullets that get interviews

Every bullet should follow the pattern strong verb + what you did + a number or result. Compare:

  • Weak: “Responsible for customer emails.”
  • Strong: “Resolved 60+ customer emails per day with a 96% satisfaction rating.”
  • Weak: “Helped with sales.”
  • Strong: “Upsold service plans to 18% of callers, adding about $2,300 in monthly revenue.”

Numbers do not have to be revenue: counts, percentages, time saved, error rates, team sizes and ratings all work. Estimate honestly where records do not exist — “about 40 tickets a day” is fine; inventing awards is not.

Getting past the ATS

Most mid-size and large US employers filter applications with applicant tracking software before a human sees them. The software looks for the skills and titles in the job posting, in standard headings, in a single-column layout. Practical rules: mirror the posting's exact job title if it truthfully fits, include the tools it names, avoid tables, headers/footers and graphics for critical text, and submit a PDF unless the posting asks for Word.

The five mistakes that quietly kill applications

One generic resume for every job (tailor at least the summary and skills each time). Typos — the single most-cited recruiter pet peeve. A full street address (city, state is enough and safer). An unprofessional email from middle school. And duties instead of results — your job description is not your resume.

A realistic workflow

Keep one master resume with everything, then spend ten minutes per application trimming it to the posting. Ten focused minutes per job beats fifty copy-paste applications — response rates prove it again and again.