How to write a résumé a recruiter can actually screen

Most résumé advice is written by people who do not read résumés for a living. This is written by people who do, and it is less flattering than the usual version.

What a recruiter actually does in the first twenty seconds

Nobody reads your résumé top to bottom on the first pass. The honest description of what happens is a scan for four things, roughly in this order: the technologies named, the dates and whether there are gaps, the seniority implied by the last two roles, and whether the work described is the kind of work in the requisition.

Twenty seconds is enough to answer all four if they are easy to find. It is not enough to hunt for them. A résumé that hides its stack in the third bullet of the second role does not get read more carefully — it gets a shorter scan, not a longer one.

The pass after that one is different: slower, looking for evidence that the claims are real. That is the pass that decides whether you get a call. But you only reach it by surviving the first.

Structure that survives the scan

• Put the stack near the top, in words. A short technical summary line — languages, platforms, tools — above your first role. Not a logo grid, not a five-star skill rating. Words, because words are what both a human and a parser can match against a requisition.
• Dates and employment type on every role. Month and year, and whether it was permanent, contract or consultancy. A contractor with six eighteen-month engagements looks like a job-hopper only when the résumé fails to say they were contracts.
• Outcomes with numbers, not lists of responsibilities. “Responsible for CI/CD” tells a screener nothing. “Cut deploy time from 40 minutes to 6 by moving the pipeline to self-hosted runners” tells them what you actually do and roughly how senior you are.
• Around one page per five years, and stop at three. Long is not thorough. If the first role you ever held is still on there in full detail, it is displacing something recent that matters more.

Formatting that breaks parsers

This is where good candidates lose interviews they would have won, and they never find out.

Multi-column layouts are the biggest offender. Many parsers read left to right across the full page width, which interleaves your sidebar into your job history and produces something unreadable. Text baked into an image or an icon is invisible — a skills section rendered as a graphic contributes nothing. Content placed in the document header or footer is frequently dropped entirely, which is a bad place for your phone number. Tables used for layout come out scrambled. Unusual fonts can substitute badly and mangle characters.

Send a PDF exported from a text-based editor, single column, standard fonts. If you want to check it, copy the text out of your own PDF and paste it into a plain text file. What you see is approximately what a parser sees. If it is a mess, so is your application.

One more, specific to this industry: name the file properly. Priya-Nair-Data-Engineer.pdf is findable in a folder of two hundred. resume-final-v3.pdf is not.

Before you send it

• Read the requisition and make sure the three technologies it leads with appear in your top third, assuming you genuinely have them.
• Check every date. Unexplained gaps get asked about; unnoticed typos get assumed to be gaps.
• Cut every line that would be true of anyone who held the job title.
• Paste the extracted text into a plain file and confirm it reads in the right order.

Ready? Submit it here — every applicant hears back.