How to Write a Resume That Gets You Hired in 2024

Most resume advice overcomplicates things. You don't need a "personal branding strategy" or a "career narrative arc." You need a clean document that shows a hiring manager - in about ten seconds - that you can do the job and that you've done similar things before.

That's it. Everything else is noise. Here's what actually matters when you're building a resume that gets callbacks.

Start With the Job Posting, Not Your Work History

Most people write their resume once and blast it everywhere. That's the single biggest reason resumes underperform. Every job posting tells you exactly what the company is looking for - the skills, the experience level, the tools. Your resume should reflect that back.

This doesn't mean fabricating experience. It means adjusting emphasis. If a posting highlights project management and cross-functional collaboration, lead your bullet points with those experiences. If it's heavy on data analysis, move your analytics work higher up. Same resume, different lens.

Read the posting line by line before you submit anything. Highlight the key skills and requirements. Then check that your resume addresses at least the top five. If it doesn't, rework it until it does.

Your Summary Gets Three Lines to Make a Case

Write a short professional summary at the top - two to three sentences maximum. It should answer: what do you do, how long have you done it, and what's the biggest result you've delivered.

Example: "Marketing manager with six years of experience building and running demand generation programs for B2B SaaS companies. Grew inbound pipeline from $2M to $7M annually through content strategy and paid acquisition. Looking to bring that same approach to a growing product-led team."

That's specific. It gives your level, your industry, a real number, and what you want next. Compare that to "Results-driven professional seeking to leverage my skills in a dynamic organization" - which says absolutely nothing and wastes valuable space at the top of your resume.

Bullet Points Need Outcomes, Not Duties

This is where most resumes fall apart. People describe what they were supposed to do instead of what happened because they were there. "Managed social media accounts" tells a hiring manager you had a job. It doesn't tell them you were any good at it.

Reframe each bullet point around an outcome. What changed? What improved? What did you build or fix or grow? Even if you don't have exact numbers, you can describe scale and impact.

"Managed social media accounts" becomes "Rebuilt the company's social media strategy from scratch, growing LinkedIn followers from 800 to 5,200 in eight months and generating the first inbound leads the channel ever produced."

One pattern I notice from our users: people who spend an extra 30 minutes rewriting their bullet points as outcomes instead of duties consistently report more responses. It's the single highest-ROI change you can make on a resume.

Keep the Format Boring (On Purpose)

Single column. Standard font. Clear section headings. Plenty of white space. That's the whole design strategy.

Fancy templates with sidebars, icons, and progress bars for your skills might look cool in a screenshot, but they cause real problems. Applicant Tracking Systems often can't parse multi-column layouts, which means your carefully crafted experience might get scrambled into nonsense before a human ever sees it.

Even for humans, clean and scannable beats pretty every time. A recruiter flipping through a stack of resumes will spend their first few seconds looking for your most recent title, company name, and top achievements. Make those impossible to miss.

The Skills Section Is Not a Dumping Ground

List skills that are relevant to what you're applying for. That's it. A targeted list of 8-12 skills that match the job posting is far more effective than a wall of 30 things you've touched at some point.

Use the same language the posting uses. If they say "Salesforce," don't write "CRM tools." If they say "Python," don't write "scripting languages." ATS systems match strings, and hiring managers scan for specific keywords. Give them exactly what they're looking for.

Education Goes at the Bottom (Usually)

Unless you graduated within the last year or two, your education section doesn't need prime real estate. Degree, school, graduation year - that's sufficient. No GPA unless it's exceptional and you're early career. No coursework lists unless they're directly relevant to the role.

If you have certifications that matter for the role - PMP, AWS, CPA, whatever - put those in a separate section right after skills. They're worth highlighting because they're verifiable and specific.

Proofread Like Your Interview Depends on It

Because it does. A typo on a resume tells a hiring manager you either didn't care enough to check or didn't notice - and neither is a good look. Read it out loud. Have someone else read it. Run it through a spell checker. Then read it one more time.

Pay special attention to company names, job titles, and technical terms. Misspelling "Kubernetes" or writing "Saas" instead of "SaaS" is the kind of small thing that makes someone question your attention to detail.

Your resume doesn't need to be clever or creative. It needs to be clear, specific, and easy to scan. Get those right, and you're ahead of most applicants. Build yours with our resume tool and focus on what actually gets you hired - showing what you've done, not just where you've been.