Most resumes are read twice: first by an Applicant Tracking System that scans for keywords, then by a human recruiter who spends an average of seven seconds deciding whether to read more. Your resume has to win both.
1. Start with a tight header
Full name, city and state, phone, professional email, and LinkedIn URL. No photo, no date of birth, no full home address. Recruiters call you back at the number and email — everything else is noise.
2. Lead with a 2-line summary
Above the fold, write one sentence that names your role and your strongest result, and a second that names the kind of work you want next. Example: "Backend engineer with 4 years building payment systems at scale (50M+ tx/mo). Looking for staff-level roles in fintech infrastructure."
3. Frame experience as outcomes, not tasks
For every role, list 3–5 bullets. Each bullet follows the same shape: verb + what you did + measurable result. "Migrated monolith to microservices" is weak. "Led migration of 12-service monolith to Kubernetes, cutting deploy time from 40 min to 4 min" is strong.
4. Match keywords from the job description
Paste the job description into a word-frequency counter. The top 10 terms (after filler words) are your ATS keywords. Work them into your summary and bullets wherever they genuinely apply — never invent skills.
5. Keep it one page until 10 years in
Two pages is acceptable only after a decade of relevant experience, or for academic/research roles. A third page is a 100% guarantee the recruiter won't reach it.
6. Save as PDF, named professionally
File name should be "FirstLast_Resume.pdf". Not "resume_final_v3_really_final.docx". PDFs render identically on every machine; Word documents do not.