How to write a resume that survives the first six seconds

What actually happens to your CV

Before a human reads your CV, two things usually happen to it. It is parsed by an applicant tracking system that turns your layout into plain text fields, and then it is skimmed by a recruiter who has forty of them open. The skim is short. Studies put it between six and eleven seconds, and my own experience screening for engineering and operations roles matches that: you are deciding whether to open the document properly, not reading it.

That reality should shape every formatting decision you make. Anything that survives being flattened into text, and anything that answers "is this person plausibly right for the role" in the top third of page one, is worth keeping. Everything else is decoration.

The structure that works

There is no single correct CV, but there is a reliable order. Put your name and contact details at the top, then a short professional summary, then experience in reverse chronological order, then skills, then education. Career changers and graduates can move education or a projects section above experience — everyone else should not.

1. Header: name, city and country, phone, email, one link (LinkedIn or portfolio). No full street address, no date of birth, no photo unless it is the norm in your country.
2. Summary: three lines, no more. Role, years of relevant experience, and one specific achievement with a number.
3. Experience: most recent first. Company, title, dates, then three to five bullets per role.
4. Skills: a short, honest list. Group by type if you have many.
5. Education and certifications: qualification, institution, year. Recent graduates can add relevant coursework; nobody else should.

Write bullets that mean something

The single biggest improvement most CVs need is turning duty statements into result statements. A duty statement describes what you were assigned. A result statement describes what changed because you were there.

Compare "Responsible for social media accounts" with "Grew the company Instagram from 3,000 to 22,000 followers in 14 months, which became the second largest source of trial signups." The second sentence tells a hiring manager the scale you work at, the timeframe you think in, and that you understand what the business cares about.

• Start every bullet with a verb in the past tense: built, negotiated, reduced, launched, trained.
• End with a number wherever one honestly exists — money, percentage, volume, time, headcount.
• If you cannot find a number, use a concrete outcome instead: a process that is now documented, an audit that passed, a client that renewed.
• Cut adjectives. "Highly motivated self-starter" costs a line and says nothing that can be verified.

Getting through automated screening

Applicant tracking systems are less magical than people fear and more literal than people expect. They generally do not reject you outright. They index your document so a recruiter can search it, and if your CV does not contain the words the recruiter searches for, you are invisible.

The fix is not keyword stuffing, which reads badly to the human at the end of the process. The fix is mirroring the language of the specific job advert where it is honestly true of you. If the advert says "accounts payable" and your CV says "supplier payments", add the phrase they used.

• Use a single-column layout. Multi-column designs frequently parse in the wrong order.
• Avoid putting critical information in headers, footers, text boxes or images — parsers often drop them.
• Use standard section titles: Experience, Education, Skills. Creative headings confuse parsers and help nobody.
• Save as PDF unless the employer asks for .docx. Name the file yourself: Dana-Okoye-CV.pdf.
• Spell out acronyms once: "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)". Recruiters search for both forms.

Tailoring without rewriting from scratch

Tailoring every application sounds exhausting, and doing it badly is. The efficient method is to keep one master CV containing every bullet you have ever earned, then create each application by deleting and reordering rather than writing.

Spend fifteen minutes per application: reorder your bullets so the three most relevant to that advert sit at the top of your most recent role, adjust your summary line to name the role you are applying for, and match two or three key phrases from the advert.

Fifteen minutes of tailoring beats an hour of writing a new CV, and it beats sending the same file to eighty employers by a wider margin still.

Common mistakes that cost interviews

• Unexplained gaps. A one-line, factual note — "Career break for caregiving, 2023–2024" — removes the question mark entirely.
• Three pages of history. Two pages is the ceiling for most people; one page if you have under five years of experience.
• A generic objective statement. "Seeking a challenging role in a dynamic organisation" is filler in every language.
• Listing every tool you have opened once. Anything on your CV is fair game in the interview.
• Typos in the first three lines. It is unfair how much weight this carries, and it carries it anyway. Read it aloud before sending.

A ten-minute final check

1. Read the top third of page one only. Would a stranger know what job you want and why you can do it?
2. Count the numbers on the page. Fewer than three is a warning sign.
3. Search the document for "responsible for" and rewrite every instance.
4. Convert to PDF, then open the PDF and copy-paste it into a plain text editor. What you see is roughly what the parser sees.
5. Ask one person who does not work in your field to read it. If they cannot tell what you do, neither can a recruiter screening outside their specialism.