A resume has two audiences now: the system that sorts it and the human who decides whether to talk to you. The mistake is optimizing for only one. A keyword-stuffed resume may pass a filter and still lose the recruiter. A beautiful visual resume may impress your friends and still parse badly.
Use boring structure on purpose
The safest resume structure is still simple: name, contact, headline or summary, experience, education, skills, optional projects. Use normal headings. Avoid columns, text boxes, icons, charts, and decorative skill bars. If a machine has to guess where your work history starts, you made it too clever.
- Save as PDF for humans and keep a plain-text version for application systems that mangle formatting.
- Use dates, titles, company names, and locations consistently.
- Put the most relevant keywords in context, inside bullets and summary lines, not in a random keyword dump.
- Name the tools and methods you actually used: SQL, lifecycle marketing, Salesforce, React, stakeholder management, vendor negotiation.
Write bullets that prove level
A strong bullet has four pieces: action, scope, decision, result. Weak bullets usually describe activity. Strong bullets describe ownership.
“Supported onboarding email campaigns and helped improve activation.”
“Owned onboarding email experiments across [segment], lifting activation by [add %] while reducing manual CRM work by [add hours/week].”
Match the role without copying the job description
Read three target job descriptions and highlight repeated requirements. Then rewrite your summary and top bullets so the same ideas appear naturally. If the role says cross-functional leadership, show the teams you aligned. If it says experimentation, show tests, decisions, and results.
- Pick one target role.
- Collect three job descriptions for that role.
- List the 10 repeated keywords or responsibilities.
- Rewrite your top 5 bullets so at least 6 of those ideas appear honestly.
- Run the resume through the SheCareers Resume Analyzer and fix the top issue first.