You are not your resume's audience, so stop designing it for yourself
Think how a recruiter would scan your resume
Working on your resume is as much an art as it is a science. We don’t exactly know what works best since everyone has conflicting opinions. If you ask 10 people about the best resume design, you will get 10 different answers. If you ask people across industries then the answers are even more varied.
First mistake that we make it tailoring the resume to make it look good and fit our aesthetic sensibilities. You are not your audience of your resume. It doesn’t matter what opinion you have of your resume. What does a recruiter think about your resume? Are they impressed? Did they lose interest?
The actual question should be “How does a recruiter scan your resume?”. Given that they have hundreds of resumes to scan through, why does your resume stand out? Are they looking for a list of technical skills or your work experience? Which one would you present first? Is Education section more important than Experience?
While this is an old study, in 2012 BusinessInsider reported that recruiters look at your resume for just 6 seconds. That’s not a lot of time, which means they are skimming it. If the resume is not eye-catching, the details are irrelevant. The layout matters more than contents if you want to cross the first hurdle - getting shortlisted.
The one on the right has clearly marked section, providing guiding lines for the recruiter to jump where they wish to.
While there are a millions of solutions to fix your resume, there is no “Correct” format. Just guidelines to improve your odds
Overview, Experience, Skills, Projects, Education etc should have their own section, with clear seperation of sections
The most recent experience matters.
Draw attention to the Company Name and Title by bolding them. Don’t bold duration, location and description. When everything is bold, nothing is bold.
If you are in tech, writing details of each job experience, broadly follow these steps
Start the sentence with an action. e.g. “Improved”, “Reduced”, “Saved Cost” etc
Use numbers to justify your achievements. They should be believable.
For Education, just bold the name of the University. If the recruiter is interested, then they can read more.
Skillset - Just have two lines. First line is a comma seperated list of technical skill and second line for non-technical skills. These are probably for ATS, not for humans.
Recruiters are likely to scan your resume from top to bottom looking at just the leftmost word. If leftmost word is catchy, they might read the rest. That’s why we start the sentence with action. That’s why the leftmost side should have name of the comany.
Let’s have a look at how an experience section could look like
CompanyName Location, State
Title/Position From - To (Duration)
Improved user satisfaction tracked using NPS from X to Y (17% improvement), by taking specific actions
Reduced request latency from X to Y (8% reduction), by investigating bottlenecks and optimizing critical code paths
Saved cost of $400K by analyzing log access patterns and updating the archival policy.