How to write a strong basic resume

You have done the work. You have the results to prove it. The problem is the page in front of you, the resume that is supposed to say all of that in the time it takes someone to glance up from their inbox. Most resumes fail here, not because the person behind them is unqualified, but because the document describes a job instead of making the case for the person who did it.

Recruiters do not read resumes top to bottom the way you write them. They scan. In ResumeGo's 2024 recruiter survey, close to half of hiring professionals said they spend somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute on a first look: long enough to register your title, your most recent employer and two or three lines, not long enough to find the good part buried in paragraph three. A strong resume is built for that scan. It puts the case for you at the top, states it plainly, and lets the detail back it up.

What does a resume actually have to do?

A resume has one job: to make the reader want to talk to you. It is not a record of your career, and it is not a form to be completed honestly and modestly. It is a short, specific argument that you can do the job in front of you, built from evidence rather than adjectives.

That means every line has to earn its place. If a sentence describes what your team or your employer did, rewrite it around what you did. If a line could sit unchanged on ten other resumes for the same title, it is not telling the reader anything about you specifically, and it can go.

How should a resume be structured?

Before a single word of content, decide the shape. For most career stages the order is your name and contact details, a short summary, your experience, then education and skills. If you are further into your career, skills or certifications can move higher when they are central to the roles you want. Whatever the order, keep the same shape all the way down the page: clear section headings, consistent spacing, one column.

One column matters more than it looks like it should. Applicant tracking systems, the software almost every mid-size and large employer uses to store and search applications, read a page left to right and top to bottom. A resume built in two or three columns, common in visually striking templates, can have its content read out of order or merged into a single scrambled block before a person ever opens it. It is one of the most common ways a genuinely strong resume goes unseen.

What should the resume summary say?

A summary is not a place to reintroduce yourself in the abstract. It is three or four lines telling the reader who you are, what you have done, and what you are looking to do next, in language specific enough that it could not describe someone else.

How do you turn duties into achievements?

The biggest gap between an average resume and a strong one is not word choice, it is what the bullet point is actually about. A duty describes what the role involved. An achievement describes what happened because you were the one doing it. Recruiters already know what a job title involves. What they do not know is whether you were good at it, and a list of duties cannot tell them.

A reliable way to build a strong bullet: what you did, how you did it, and what changed because of it. Not every line needs a dramatic figure, but most should carry some kind of result: a percentage, a dollar figure, a headcount, a timeframe, anything that gives the reader something to measure.

A list of duties tells a recruiter what your job was. A list of results tells them whether you were good at it.

What goes in the education and skills sections?

Once your experience section is doing the work, the remaining sections should be short and clean. List your degree, institution and graduation year if you are early in your career; once you have several years of experience, this section can shrink to a single line. Skills sections work best as a focused list of genuine, specific capabilities relevant to the role, not a wall of buzzwords. If a skill would not survive a follow-up question in an interview, it does not belong on the page.

How should a resume be formatted for ATS software and for people?

Use standard section headings the software expects, such as Experience and Education, rather than a stylized version like My Journey. Avoid tables, text boxes and graphics, which are the layout choices most likely to be read out of order or dropped entirely. Keep your contact details in the main body of the page rather than a header or footer, since some parsers skip both. Submit the file format the application asks for; a simple, well-structured resume reads cleanly as either a Word document or a PDF.

None of this is about tricking software. The systems recruiters use are built to organize and search applications, not to filter out qualified candidates on sight. The far more common reason a good resume goes unseen is a formatting choice, usually a multi-column layout or a graphic-heavy template, that scrambles the content before a person ever opens it. Keep the design simple and let the substance carry it.

What should you do before you send it?

A resume is never really finished, it is aimed. The version that earns an interview for a director role is not the version that earns one for your first move into management, even when the underlying career is the same. Read it once more with the specific role in front of you, and ask whether every line is still pulling its weight for that job. If it is, send it.