Resume tips that change decisions

1. Turn duties into outcomes

This is the highest-value edit available, and most resumes need it on nearly every line. A duty says what you were assigned. An outcome says what was different because you were there.

Before: Responsible for handling the company's email marketing campaigns.

After: Rebuilt the email onboarding sequence; open rates went from 12% to 27% over four months.

Work through your resume one bullet at a time and ask: so what? If the answer is "the work got done", you have written a duty. If the answer is "something measurably changed", you have written an outcome.

Where no metric exists, state the scope or the difficulty instead — "sole developer on a product used by 400 internal staff", "migrated a legacy system with no documentation". Both are outcomes without being numbers. What you must not do is estimate a figure you cannot defend; see the experience section of our resume guide for more on that.

2. Fix the first word of every bullet

Recruiters scan the left edge of the page. The first word of each bullet does disproportionate work, and three openers waste it entirely: "Responsible for", "Worked on", and "Helped with". All three describe proximity to work rather than the work.

Before: Worked on improving the checkout flow with the design team.

After: Redesigned the checkout flow with two designers; cart abandonment fell 18%.

Start with a verb that describes what you actually did: built, rewrote, migrated, negotiated, launched, cut, automated, trained, consolidated, recovered. Pick the accurate one rather than the most impressive one — if you contributed to something rather than leading it, "contributed to" is honest and a recruiter will respect it more than an overstatement that collapses under a follow-up question.

3. Delete adjectives about yourself

Hard-working. Detail-oriented. Passionate. Dynamic. Results-driven. Self-motivated. Team player. Every one of these appears on a large share of resumes, which is exactly why none of them carries information. Nobody has ever described themselves as careless and unmotivated, so the claim distinguishes you from nobody.

Replace the claim with the evidence:

The right-hand column is longer, and worth the space. It also gives an interviewer something concrete to ask about, which is generally what you want.

4. Add the detail only you could know

A resume becomes memorable through specificity. If a bullet could have been written by any of two hundred other applicants, it is doing nothing for you.

Generic: Managed inventory for a retail store.

Specific: Managed stock for a 12,000-SKU electronics store; cut dead stock by a third by moving reorder points onto actual sales velocity.

The second version names the scale, the actual problem, and the actual method. None of that is invented — it is detail the writer already had and did not think to include. Read each of your bullets and ask what you left out because it seemed obvious to you. That is usually the interesting part.

5. Fix the top third first

Early reading of a resume is fast and shallow. Whatever occupies the top third of page one carries most of the weight, so that is where your editing time belongs.

Check what is actually up there. If it is a four-line summary of unverifiable adjectives followed by a full education block from eight years ago, your strongest evidence is below the fold. Move your most relevant experience up, cut the summary to two specific lines or remove it, and push education down. Section order covers the recommended arrangement by career stage.

6. Borrow the employer's vocabulary

If the posting says "stakeholder management" and your resume says "worked with clients", you have the experience and will not be matched to it. Where the employer's phrasing honestly describes what you did, use their phrasing.

This is not keyword stuffing. Stuffing means repeating terms to hit a density target, which produces prose no human wants to read. Borrowing vocabulary means choosing, between two accurate ways of saying something, the one your reader already uses. The keywords section of the ATS guide works through the method.

7. Cut the filler phrases

Resume prose is compressed on purpose. These constructions add length without adding meaning:

• "Successfully completed" → "Completed". If it were unsuccessful you would not list it.
• "Was tasked with" → start with the verb.
• "In order to" → "to".
• "Utilised" → "used".
• "A variety of" / "various" → name them, or drop it.
• "Assisted in the process of" → "helped".
• "Duties included" → delete the line and keep the bullets.
• "References available on request" → delete. It is assumed.

Each cut recovers a few words, and a few words per bullet across a full page is often the difference between two pages and a well-judged one.

8. Weight the page by relevance

Space signals importance. A reader assumes your longest section is your most significant work, so an internship from five years ago with six bullets while your current role has two is actively misleading them.

Give recent, relevant roles three to six bullets. Give older or less relevant roles one or two, or just the title, employer and dates. Anything beyond roughly fifteen years can be compressed into a single "Earlier experience" line. The shape of the page should tell the story before a word is read.

9. Proofread in a way that works

You cannot proofread your own resume by rereading it, because you know what it is supposed to say. Use methods that break that familiarity:

• Read it aloud. Catches broken grammar and bullets that run out of air.
• Read it backwards, last bullet to first. Removes the narrative flow that hides errors.
• Change the font and zoom before a final pass. Unfamiliar shapes make typos visible again.
• Check the things spellcheck approves: your own name, company names, job titles, dates, and every number.
• Verify the dates add up. Overlapping or impossible date ranges are common and look careless.
• Have one other person read it. Still the most effective step available.

Check the file name too. A recruiter downloading resume_final_v3(2).pdf forms an impression before opening it.

Mistakes worth checking for

These are the recurring, avoidable problems — quick to check, embarrassing to leave in.

• The previous employer's name still in a tailored line. The most damaging copy-paste error there is.
• An email address you no longer read. Test it.
• A dead portfolio or LinkedIn link. Click every link before sending.
• Contact details in a header or footer, where parsers often will not find them.
• Information carried only by a graphic — rating bars and charts contain no readable text.
• Inconsistent date formats within the same document.
• An unexplained multi-year gap. One honest line closes it.
• Skills you could not answer a question about. The list is a set of promises.
• A photograph on an application to India, the US, the UK, Canada or Australia.
• Sending Word when you meant PDF, and having your layout reflow on someone else's machine.

Where to go next

For the full document structure, start with the resume writing guide. For conventions around length, tense and format, see resume best practices. Before submitting through a company portal, check parsing with the ATS resume guide. Our blog post on resume mistakes to avoid covers additional examples.

Frequently asked questions