How to write a tech résumé that actually gets found

We run a service that submits job applications for people, so we spend a lot of time looking at postings, forms and résumés from the other side of the send button.

Here is what we would recommend, in the order we would do it. Some of it contradicts what you have been told.

Throw out the robot story first

You have heard that most résumés are auto-rejected by software before a human ever sees them.

Stop worrying about it. That isn't really how these systems work. What the software mostly does is parse your résumé into fields, store them, and let a recruiter search the pile. It ranks and routes. It doesn't sit in judgement on your font.

The thing that genuinely does reject you automatically is the knockout question — the yes/no items on the application form itself. Work authorisation. Years of experience. Sponsorship. Employers set automatic rules on those answers, and the rule fires on what you typed into the form, not on anything in your PDF.

Spend thirty careful seconds on those dropdowns rather than three hours reformatting a document to beat a filter that isn't running.

The real failure is quieter than rejection

Bad formatting doesn't reject you. It extracts your details wrong, and then you don't turn up in the recruiter's search.

Nobody rejects you. You are simply not in the result set. There's no email for that outcome, which is why it stays invisible — and it's the thing actually worth engineering against.

So the first rule: be findable, then be readable. Everything below follows from that.

Make it parse

Boring, and it's the highest-return hour you will spend.

• One column. Multi-column layouts get read in the wrong order and interleave your job titles with your skills.
• Real text, not a picture. Open your PDF and try to select a sentence. If you can't highlight it, neither can anything else. Export from a document editor rather than building a résumé in a design tool.
• Nothing important in the header or footer. That region is often dropped entirely. If your phone number and email live up there, you've built a résumé that can't contact you back. Shrink your margins instead.
• Standard section names. Work Experience. Education. Skills. Projects. Clever headings parse into nothing.
• No tables, text boxes, icons or graphics carrying information you need read.
• Dates in one obvious format, month and year, every time.

Assume the strictest possible reader on the other end. You can't tell from the outside which system you're facing, and they vary a lot.

Write for a short first pass

The first look at your résumé is brief. It isn't a reading — it's a decision about whether to start reading.

In that pass, someone wants your current title and company, the one before it, your dates, and your education. Make those four findable without hunting. Bold titles, clear sections, generous whitespace.

If a stranger can't answer "what is this person, and where have they been" from one glance at the top third of page one, nothing else you wrote gets reached.

Say what changed because you were there

This is the part most people skip, because it's the only part that's genuinely work. It's also the one we'd fix first if we could fix only one thing.

Every bullet should name an outcome, attach a number to it, and say how you did it.

Responsible for improving the performance of the checkout service.

versus

Cut checkout p95 latency from 780ms to 410ms by replacing the synchronous tax lookup with a cached batch call.

Same job. The first tells a reader you were present. The second tells them what changed, and hands them something to ask you about in an interview — which is what a résumé is for.

When you don't have a clean metric, and engineers often don't, use scope instead of reaching for a business result you never owned. Services owned. Requests or users served. Data volume. Deploy frequency. Team size. Uptime. On-call load. "Owned four services handling 12M requests a day" is real, defensible and specific.

Never invent a figure. Beyond the obvious reason: a number on your résumé is an invitation, and the first question is how you got to it. A made-up 40% has no story underneath and it collapses in two follow-ups. An honest scope number beats an impressive one you can't defend.

The small mechanical things, while you're in there: lead with a verb, delete "responsible for" and "helped with", hold bullets to one or two lines, three to five on recent roles and fewer on old ones.

One page is not a law

Somebody told all of us a résumé must fit on one page. For anyone senior, we don't think that's right.

• Under about ten years of experience, new graduate, or career switcher — one page.
• Senior and above — two pages is fine, and often expected.

The failure mode on page two is never length, it's padding. An old role carrying five bullets is worse than no second page at all. Page two has to earn its place. If it does, use it.

Mirror the posting, honestly

Tailoring works, for the findability reason above. Recruiters search literally. If a posting names a specific tool and your résumé says "container orchestration" instead of naming it, you don't appear, and nobody involved ever finds out.

So take the top two or three requirements from the posting, find where your real experience matches them, and describe it in their words rather than your last company's internal ones.

There's one test, and it has two halves: is it true of you, and can a human see it?

Keyword stuffing fails both. So does white text on a white background, the trick that refuses to die. The text layer is what gets read, so the hidden words come through in full the moment anyone opens the parsed version or copies the file. You haven't built an advantage. You've filed a document proving you tried to deceive them, and it stays in their database.

Employers are also actively looking for invisible text aimed at an AI reader now. It was always a bad bet. It's a worse one this year.

Some of it isn't your résumé's fault

Worth saying plainly, because a lot of advice implies otherwise: if you're early in your career, the number of roles genuinely open to you is far smaller than the number of roles posted. Most listings that look junior aren't.

That's a volume problem wearing a quality problem's clothes, and no amount of bullet rewriting fixes it. Get the résumé good, then stop polishing it and go wide. The same goes for the filters you can't argue with — clearance requirements, location, sponsorship. Screen those out at the start rather than in the final round.

What we won't tell you to do

Plenty of résumé advice is delivered with total confidence and has nothing behind it. We're not going to pass it on:

• Whether to include a professional summary. Credible people say opposite things. It's preference. Write one if it does real work; skip it otherwise.
• The perfect number of bullets, the correct font, the right margins. Convention, not evidence. Be consistent and legible, then stop.
• Skill proficiency bars. Recruiters dislike them, and you can't defend "React: 80%" when someone asks what the missing 20% is.
• Anything designed to game an AI screener. Aside from being dishonest, it aims at a moving target that's being watched.

The short version: be findable, be legible in a glance, say what changed because you were there, put a real number on it, and don't lie. The rest is decoration, and a lot of it is being sold to you.