The procedure
Seven steps, in the order that works
Written to be followed once, top to bottom. Steps one and five are where the time goes, and they are the two that decide whether anyone calls you.
1Collect the raw material
20 minutes, before you open any tool
Write down every job: employer, job title, city, and the month and year you started and left. Then for each one, two or three things that were different when you left than when you arrived — and a number for each, if a number exists.
Numbers hide in places people forget to look: old performance reviews, the CRM, analytics dashboards, invoices you sent, the size of the team you were on, the budget you signed off, how many tickets or customers or classes you handled a week. If a result genuinely has no number, use scale instead — how many people, how often, how large.
2Pick the layout before you write
2 minutes
Reverse chronological, one column of body text, unless you have a specific reason otherwise. Deciding this first means you never rewrite a paragraph because it stopped fitting.
The three layouts on our templates page all do this, and switching between them later changes nothing you typed.
Resume templates →
3Write the header
5 minutes
Your name, the job title you are applying for, city and country, email, phone, and one link. That is the whole header.
Leave out your full street address, your date of birth and your marital status unless the market you are applying in expects them. Do not title the document "Curriculum Vitae" — the reader can see what it is, and the line costs you a centimetre of the only page you have.
Example
Alexandra Novak
Account Manager
Prague, Czech Republic · alexandra.novak@email.com · +420 123 456 789 · linkedin.com/in/anovak
4Write the summary last, put it first
15 minutes
Two or three sentences: what you are, how long you have done it, one concrete result, and what you are aiming at now. Write it after the experience section, when you can see what your own evidence actually says.
If the sentence would sit unchanged on somebody else's resume, it is not a summary, it is padding. Delete it and give the space back to your experience.
What people write
Motivated professional seeking a challenging position in a dynamic company where I can use my skills and grow.
What gets read
Account manager, six years in B2B SaaS. Took a 40-account book from 71% to 84% renewal in two years by rebuilding the review call around usage data. Looking for a mid-market role where renewal is a product conversation, not a discount one.
5Write the experience bullets
30 minutes, and the only step that really matters
One formula, used every time: what you did, how you did it, what changed. The verb at the front is not the point — the outcome at the end is.
Three to five bullets on your last two roles, one or two on anything older than about eight years. Present tense for the job you are in, past tense for everything else. Never start a bullet with "Responsible for".
The same bullet, three industries
Responsible for customer service and working the till.
Ran the Saturday shift solo at 180 covers, and trained four new servers who each stayed past their first year.
Worked on the backend of the checkout system.
Cut checkout API p95 latency from 1.4 s to 320 ms by replacing N+1 queries with a batched loader; cart abandonment fell 6% the following quarter.
Taught mathematics to Year 9 students.
Rewrote the Year 9 maths scheme of work around weekly low-stakes testing; pass rate went from 62% to 78% across two cohorts.
None of these invented anything. Each one names the thing that was already true and puts the outcome where the eye lands.
6Fill in skills, education and the rest
10 minutes
Skills are named tools, languages and systems — eight to fifteen of them, grouped, with no star ratings. Mirror the wording of the posting wherever it is honestly true of you, because that is the text the screening software compares.
Education goes above experience while you are studying or in your first year out, and below it from then on. List the degree, the institution and the year. Languages need a real scale: native, fluent, working, basic, or the CEFR levels. Leave references off entirely — "references available on request" spends a line saying something every employer already assumes.
7Cut it, check it, export it
10 minutes
One page under ten years of experience, two above it. Then read it once as a stranger would, at arm's length, for twenty seconds, and see what you actually retain.
Export a PDF unless the posting asks for something else. Name the file with your own name and the role — "Novak-Alexandra-Account-Manager.pdf", not "resume-final-v3.pdf". Then tailor it per application: swapping the target title and reordering four bullets to match the posting takes twenty minutes and does more than any redesign.
