How To Write

You have the target from Chapter I. Now the resume has to prove it on the page, fast, to a reader who is barely reading. Good bullets are not written, they are engineered. Here is the mechanism.

The recruiter gives you seconds, not minutes

A recruiter's first pass over your resume lasts about seven seconds. In that window they are not reading, they are scanning: job titles, company names, dates, and the first few words of each bullet. That makes the front of every bullet prime real estate, and burying the result at the end wastes it. Write so the scan alone tells your story.

One formula, every bullet

Strong bullets follow a shape: a strong action verb, the scope you operated at, and a measurable result. Verb first, so the scan catches it. Scope, so the reader knows the size of the game. Result, so they know you won. Compare these:

• Weak: "Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts."
• Strong: "Grew Instagram from 4k to 31k followers in nine months by shipping a daily short-form series."
• Weak: "Worked on improving the checkout flow."
• Strong: "Redesigned the checkout flow, cutting cart abandonment 18% and adding roughly $240k in annual revenue."

Notice what changed. "Responsible for" and "worked on" describe a chair you sat in. "Grew" and "redesigned" describe something you did. Duties tell the reader what your job was. Outcomes tell them what happened because you held it. Recruiters hire for the second one.

Lead each role with its heaviest hit

Within a single job, your bullets do not have to run in the order things happened. Put the most impressive, most relevant result first, because that is the one the scan will land on. Three to five sharp bullets per recent role beats eight thin ones, since the weak entries only dilute the strong ones and push them further down the page. Older roles can shrink to a line or two. Recency and relevance earn space, not seniority of memory. Keep the tense honest while you are at it: past tense for what you have finished, present tense only for what you are still doing right now.

Find the numbers you think you do not have

"But my work was not quantifiable" almost always means you have not looked hard enough. Numbers hide inside ordinary work:

• Volume: how many tickets, customers, releases, articles, or dollars you handled.
• Time: how much faster something got, or how long you sustained it.
• Frequency: daily, weekly, per sprint, per quarter.
• Comparison: before and after, versus the target, versus last year.
• Team and budget: how many people, how large a budget, how many stakeholders.

When you truly cannot measure the outcome, measure the input or the scale: "across 12 markets," "for a 40-person team," "on a $2M budget." A reasonable estimate you can defend beats a vague claim you cannot. If you are unsure, write "roughly" and round conservatively.

Cut the words that carry no weight

Every filler word shoves the number further down the line, past where the seven-second scan ever reaches. Delete these on sight:

• "Responsible for," "tasked with," "duties included."
• "Helped," "assisted with," "worked on." Say what you actually did.
• "Successfully," "effectively," "various," "several." They add length, not meaning.
• Articles and hedges wherever the bullet reads clean without them.

Format so a machine can read you

Most applications pass through an applicant tracking system before a human ever sees them, and those parsers are literal. Fancy layouts confuse them and quietly drop your content. Keep the structure boring and bulletproof:

• One column. Multi-column layouts scramble when they are parsed.
• Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. The parser looks for those exact words.
• No tables, text boxes, headers, footers, or images. Text trapped inside them often vanishes.
• Real bullet characters and standard fonts, with no icons standing in for words.
• Save as a text-based PDF or .docx, never a scanned image or a screenshot.

A clean, parseable, outcome-driven resume is doing two jobs at once: it clears the machine first, then it rewards the seven-second human scan waiting on the other side.