How to Write a Resume or CV That Gets Interviews: A Recruiter’s Complete Guide

The resume that changed my morning was nothing special to look at. Clean type, plenty of white space, three jobs listed. I had a stack of applications to get through before lunch and a hiring manager chasing me for a shortlist by five.

Halfway down the first page, one line stopped me. The candidate had kept a warehouse running through a systems migration that had flattened two other sites, and she said so in a single sentence. I could picture her. More to the point, I could picture her doing the job I was hiring for. She went straight into the interview pile, and most of that stack did not.

I spent 12+ years on the hiring side as an international recruiter, and since founding MyStar Resumes I have written for more than 30,000 clients. This guide is everything I know about writing a resume or CV that gets interviews, section by section, with the wording patterns that made my shortlists.

The short answer

A resume or CV gets interviews when a busy stranger can say yes to it in seconds. In practice that means five things. Use a clean, scannable format. Open with a summary that positions you for the role you want. Build a skills section that mirrors the language of the job ad. Write your work experience as achievements with evidence, rather than lists of duties. Then tailor the whole thing, lightly, for every single application.

Each of those has a craft to it, and I will take you through all of them. Hold onto one mindset shift as you read. Your resume or CV is an advertisement written for one specific reader, the person deciding who gets interviewed. Every choice you make should serve that reader.

Write for the reader’s first pass

Nobody reads a resume or CV the way you wrote it. The first pass is a fast scan, and the decision it produces is brutally simple, worth a closer look or straight to the no pile. I have written in detail about how recruiters really read your resume or CV, and the short version is this. The reader’s eyes go to your current job title, your current employer, your dates, and whatever you have placed in the top third of the first page.

So the top third has to carry the argument on its own. Your name, a professional headline if you use one, a summary that connects you to the role, and your most recent position, all visible without scrolling or turning the page. A candidate who buries their strongest material on page two has, in effect, hidden it. Nearly every reader who matters will decide before they get there.

Write the whole document to survive scanning. Short bullets. Strong first words. Bold only where it earns attention. If a line does no work for the target role, cut it, because every weak line dilutes the strong ones around it.

Get the format and length right

Format questions take up half the emails I receive, and the answers are simpler than the internet makes them. Use a single-column layout with a standard, readable font. Put your name and contact details at the top, then summary, then skills, then experience in reverse chronological order, then education. Keep dates in a consistent format and in a predictable place, because a reader who has to hunt for your dates starts wondering why.

A clean single-column layout has a practical bonus, too. It parses correctly in the application systems most companies use, so the version the recruiter sees on screen matches the one you sent. That is a formatting courtesy, and it costs you nothing.

On length, two pages is the ceiling for most careers, and one page serves you well in your first few years of work. Reach further back than the most recent ten to fifteen years only when an older role directly supports your target. I have covered the reasoning in how far back a resume or CV should go, including the graceful ways to compress early career history into a line or two.

Leave out photos, full street addresses, date of birth, and marital status if you are applying in the US or UK. A city and country, a phone number, an email address, and a LinkedIn URL cover everything a recruiter needs to move you forward.

Send the finished document as a PDF unless the application asks for something else, so your formatting arrives exactly as you built it. Name the file properly, your full name plus the words resume or CV, because “Document_final_v7” tells the reader something about you before they open it, and it is never the thing you wanted to say.

Write a summary that positions you

The summary is the most valuable real estate on the page, and the place most people waste. Three to four lines, written in first person with the pronouns dropped, doing one job, drawing a straight line between what you have done and what the target role needs.

The formula I use for every client runs in four beats. Say who you are professionally. Say the value you bring. Give a piece of evidence. Angle all of it at the target role without naming the role itself.

Here is the shape in practice, for an operations candidate aiming at senior operations and site leadership roles.

> Operations leader with a decade running multi-site logistics for major retailers. Known for taking over underperforming sites and making them reliable, including turning a region’s weakest depot into its benchmark within two years. Builds teams that hit their numbers without burning out, and keeps service steady through peak, change, and everything in between.

Notice there is no “seeking a challenging position”, no adjectives doing the work that evidence should do, and no mention of the job title itself. The reader should finish it thinking, this person already does what I need.

The same formula scales down as well as up. A junior candidate aiming at analyst roles might write, “Economics graduate who turns messy data into decisions people can act on, from a dissertation built on real client data to a placement year spent automating the reports everyone dreaded. Happiest when the spreadsheet is ugly and the deadline is real.” Two lines, full confidence, and evidence a graduate can genuinely own. Whatever your level, write the summary last, after your achievement bullets exist, because a summary is a distillation of the page below it.

Build a skills section that mirrors the ad

The skills section exists for two readers, the scanning human and the search function, and the same list serves both. Keep it tight, a single block of short terms, each one to three words, separated cleanly.

The selection rule is simple. Open the job ad for your target role, note the skills and tools it names, and lead with the ones you genuinely have, in their words. If the ad says “stakeholder management” and you have been writing “client liaison”, change your wording, because the reader is pattern-matching against the ad in their head and you want to be the pattern.

Keep the list to hard, checkable skills, the tools, methods, systems, and specialisms someone could test you on. Claims like “team player” and “good communicator” belong in your achievement bullets as demonstrated behavior, where they carry weight, rather than in a list where every candidate makes them identically.

Turn your experience into achievements

This section is the heart of your resume or CV, and it is where nearly every draft I see falls down. Most people write their experience as a job description, a faithful list of what the role required. The problem is that a job description is identical for everyone who ever held the job. Achievements are yours alone, and achievements are what get interviews.

Give each role a one-line overview for context, then bullets that each follow the same pattern. Strong verb, what you did, and the outcome or evidence that proves it mattered. The transformation is easiest to see side by side.

Before: Responsible for managing the store team and daily operations.

After: Led a team of (your team size) through a full store refit, keeping the doors open and hitting every trading target during the works.

Before: Duties included processing invoices and supplier payments.

After: Cleared a six-month invoice backlog within my first quarter, then kept every supplier payment on schedule from that point on.

Before: Responsible for the company’s social media accounts.

After: Built the company’s LinkedIn presence from a dormant page into its main source of inbound inquiries.

Before: Handled customer complaints and escalations.

After: Became the escalation point for the region’s hardest cases and turned several at-risk accounts into renewals.

Before: Assisted with onboarding new staff.

After: Designed the induction week now used across all three sites, cutting new-hire time to full productivity by weeks.

Read the before lines as a recruiter would. They confirm the person showed up. The after lines answer the only question the reader is asking, which is what happens for us if we hire you.

On volume, give your current and most recent roles the most space, around five to eight bullets each, and let older roles taper to two or three. Every bullet should carry a different achievement. If two bullets prove the same strength, keep the stronger and cut the other, because repetition reads as padding and padding reads as a thin career.

Where you have real numbers, use your own, in brackets if you are still gathering them, (team size), (budget), (revenue figure). Where you have none, evidence can be qualitative and still land, first to do it, chosen ahead of more senior colleagues, kept it running when the rest of the region went down, asked to train the rest of the team. Never invent a figure. A made-up number collapses in the interview, and interviews are the entire point.

Keep tenses honest, present tense for your current role, past tense for previous ones, and keep the verb strength consistent from your first role to your last. A resume or CV that starts with “spearheaded” and fades to “helped with” by page two tells the reader exactly when you stopped trying.

Keep education simple

Education earns its place through relevance, and relevance changes with career stage. If you graduated within the last few years, place education above experience and give it room, your degree, institution, graduation year, and any project, thesis, or result that supports your target. Once you have solid work history, education moves below experience and shrinks to essentials, degree, institution, year. School-level qualifications come off the page as soon as you hold a degree.

Certifications and licenses are the exception, because for many roles they are the ticket to entry. A project management certification, a nursing license, a safety card, a cloud certification, these belong where the reader will see them fast, either in your skills block or in a short certifications line near the top. If the job ad names a credential you hold, make it impossible to miss.

Recent, relevant training earns a line too, especially when you are moving toward something new. A completed course in the direction of your target role tells the reader your interest has receipts, and it costs you one line to say so.

Cut the mistakes that get you screened out

After years of screening, I can tell you the same handful of problems send good candidates to the no pile over and over. I keep a full list in the resume or CV red flags that get you screened out, and these are the ones I saw most.

Typos and inconsistent formatting, because the reader treats your resume or CV as a sample of your work, and sloppy sample means sloppy work. Read it aloud, then have one other person read it cold.

Dense paragraphs where bullets should be. A recruiter scanning a wall of text takes the easier option, which is the next application in the pile.

Missing or vague dates. Years and months, in order, every role. Ambiguity around dates reads as concealment even when it is only carelessness.

An objective statement at the top. Objectives describe what you want, and the reader is shopping for what they need. Replace the objective with the summary formula above, which speaks the reader’s language.

Stale material, the software you last touched a decade ago, the award from your first job, the hobby list. Everything on the page should either support the target role or come off.

Handle gaps before the reader guesses

Gaps in your history draw the eye, and an unexplained gap invites the reader to write the story for you. Their imagined version is usually worse than your real one. The fix is one calm line in the timeline itself, career break for family care, recovery from illness followed by a phased return, relocation and full-time job search, independent travel. Stated plainly, a gap becomes a fact. Left blank, it becomes a question mark, and question marks lose interviews to candidates without them.

There are clean techniques for presenting gaps of different lengths and causes, including when years-only dates are legitimate and when they backfire, and I have set them all out in how to explain an employment gap.

Tailor it for every application

The final habit separates the people who get interviews from the people who wonder why they never hear back. One resume or CV, sent identically to every opening, matches none of them well. Tailoring sounds like hard work, and the version worth doing takes about 20 minutes per application.

Three moves cover it. First, adjust your summary so its final beat points at this role, using the language of this ad. Second, reorder your skills so the ad’s priorities appear first. Third, look at your bullets for the two or three most recent roles and promote the ones this employer cares about most, demoting or trimming the ones they will skim.

Here is the first move in action. Suppose your summary ends, “keeps service steady through peak, change, and everything in between”, and the ad you are answering leads with warehouse automation. The tailored ending becomes, “keeps service steady through automation rollouts, peak trading, and everything in between”. One phrase changed, and the reader now believes the document was written for them, because the part that matters was.

That 20 minutes is the cheapest advantage in the whole job search. While a generic application sits in the maybe pile, a tailored one reads like it was written for the job, because it was, and the interview slot goes to the candidate who did it.

Bringing it together

Run the finished document through the reader’s eyes one last time. Top third carries the argument. Format survives a fast scan. Summary positions you, skills mirror the ad, every bullet proves value, gaps are answered, and the whole thing points at this role. That is a resume or CV built the way recruiters wish they all were, and it will get read.

Writing about your own career is the hardest writing there is, and if you would rather have a recruiter’s eye on yours, that is exactly what I do. You can build your package here, resume or CV writing for $149 with unlimited revisions, and I will make sure yours is the one that stops the reader halfway down the page.

I’m Claire Lawrence. I spent more than 12 years as an international recruiter, and since 2013 I’ve helped over 30,000 clients get noticed and get hired.

Want it written for you? I personally write resumes or CVs ($149), cover letters and LinkedIn profiles, with unlimited revisions until you love them. Build your package here.

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