Top 31 Resume Tips (to Get You Hired)

Most resume advice is 100 tips deep and priority-free, which is how people end up polishing fonts while their bullets still describe duties. These 31 resume tips are grouped by where they act, content, formatting, tailoring, sections and sending, and inside each group they run in payoff order. Do the first 2 of every group and you are ahead of most of the pile.

How to use a list of 31

Not as a checklist for one sitting. The content tips are worth a full evening, because they change what the resume says; the formatting tips are a one-time setup; the tailoring tips repeat per application; the sending tips take 10 minutes, once, forever. Work them in that order and skip nothing in the first group, since content problems are the only ones a recruiter will never forgive. Formatting sins get a sigh; a page of duties gets a pass.

Content tips: 1 to 8

1. Turn every duty into an achievement. Responsible for reporting is a job description; cut reporting time from 3 days to 1 is a hire signal. One number per bullet, minimum, and when a bullet resists quantifying, ask what would have gone wrong if you had not done the work; the answer usually carries the figure.

2. Open every bullet with a distinct action verb. Purdue's Online Writing Lab publishes a categorized action verb list; no verb repeats inside a role, and responsible for never appears. The verb is also where honesty lives: led, built and negotiated claim different things, and the interview will test whichever one you chose.

3. Use ranges when exact figures are confidential. Cut onboarding time by about a third says as much as the raw number and breaks no NDA. Fractions, multiples and before-and-after states (from 6 days to 2) all quantify without disclosing.

4. Load the top third. Name, title line, summary and your single best proof live above the fold, because that is all a first skim reliably covers. Bury the best number on page 2 and, for most readers, it does not exist; a fast self-test is to cover everything below the first third and ask whether you would call this person back.

5. Write to one job, not your autobiography. The resume is an argument for a specific role; experience that does not serve the argument shrinks to a line or leaves. Completeness is what LinkedIn is for, and the two documents doing different jobs is the system working.

6. Cut the duties everyone assumes. Answered emails, attended meetings and used Microsoft Word cost lines that achievements could hold. If every holder of the title did it by definition, it is not information; the test for any line is whether its opposite would ever appear on a resume.

7. Match tenses to time. Present tense for the current role, past for everything else, consistently. Mixed tenses read as carelessness in the one document meant to prove care, and they cluster exactly where people edit in a hurry: the newest role.

8. Drop the first person. No I, me or my anywhere; resume grammar starts at the verb. The subject of every line is already known, which is also why third-person references to yourself read even stranger than first.

Formatting tips: 9 to 15

Formatting is the group where perfection is cheap: one honest evening of setup, or one good template, retires all 7 tips at once.

9. Design for 7.4 seconds. That is the average first review in Ladders' recruiter eye-tracking study, and the resumes that held attention longer shared a look: clean single-column layouts, clear section headings, obvious hierarchy. Design for the skim you will actually get, not the read you hope for.

10. Keep the headings boring. Work Experience, Skills, Education. Software and skimmers both search for those exact words, and My Journey So Far matches neither. Creativity belongs inside the bullets, where it reads as substance instead of navigation.

11. One typeface, 10 to 12 point, name largest. Typography's whole job here is hierarchy, not personality. Two fonts is a design decision; on a resume, design decisions are risk taken on the least forgiving page you will ever ship.

12. Treat white space as content. Margins between half an inch and an inch, and real gaps between sections. A cramped page reads as a cramped thinker, and shrinking the font to force one page fools nobody at 9 point; if the material will not fit honestly, the cut belongs in the content, not the leading.

The one-page question

13. One page under about 10 years of experience. Not because rules, because attention: the page count sets how much of your best material actually gets seen, and one strong page beats two diluted ones. The discipline of cutting to a page is also where weak bullets get found, which is a benefit the second page quietly costs you.

14. Earn the second page before using it. A full second page of relevant work is fine; a third of a page of filler is not. Nobody reads page 3, and the fastest fix for an awkward page-and-a-quarter is cutting the oldest role to one line.

15. Export a PDF from a text editor, never a scan. The paste test proves it in 2 minutes: select all, copy, paste into a plain text editor, and read whether everything survived in order. Starting from a template that already passes makes tips 9 to 14 someone else's finished work.

Tailoring tips: 16 to 21

This is the group that repeats, which is why it is built to fit in 15 minutes. One master resume holds everything; each application gets a copy with these 6 applied.

16. Mirror the posting's job title where it is honest. A title line under your name is the cheapest relevance signal on the page. Operations Coordinator applying as Operations Coordinator starts the read as a match, not a translation exercise; when your real title differs, the honest bridge is both, as in Logistics Specialist (Operations Coordinator scope).

17. Reorder the skills list per application. The ad's first requirements become your first entries; which skills earn a line changes with every posting, and the order changes with it. Reordering costs 2 minutes and reads, correctly, as having actually read the ad.

18. Swap 2 or 3 bullets per application. Keep a bench of spare bullets in the master resume, then promote the ones this posting cares about. An AI gap-check makes it a 15-minute job, and writing a resume with AI without the tells is a skill worth the read.

Keywords without stuffing

19. Match exact strings. Screening software compares literally, and how tracking systems read the file rewards the posting's own vocabulary. The recruiter searching the parsed database types the same strings from the same req, so the mirroring pays twice.

20. Spell out certifications both ways. Certified Public Accountant (CPA), once, so either search string hits. The same doubling applies to well-known tools with two names, like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and to degree names a recruiter might search either way.

21. Never stuff. Keyword walls and white-text tricks read as spam to software and desperation to humans, and one honest placement inside a real sentence outranks 9 repetitions anyway. If a keyword has no true sentence to live in, that is the posting telling you something about fit.

Section tips: 22 to 26

Five tips, one per section, each catching that section's most common failure.

22. Summary in 3 sentences, numbers included. Title and years, one or two proofs, the fit line; 30 worked models sit in resume summaries by role and level.

23. Skills list: 8 to 12, hard skills only. Soft skills get proven inside bullets, not listed; teamwork as a list item convinces nobody, while led a 6-person crew convinces everyone. The list is a per-posting call, and the exact strings come from the ad.

24. Let education shrink as experience grows. Degree, school, year while recent; a line or 2 once you have real roles. GPA appears only above 3.5 and only within a few years of graduating; after that, nobody asks and listing it reads as living in the past.

25. Make optional sections pay rent. Certifications, projects and languages stay only when they beat what they displace, the same displacement test that runs through writing the resume section by section. On a first resume, those optional sections ARE the experience and move up accordingly.

26. Default to reverse-chronological. The chronological, functional or hybrid decision has real answers for career changers and gaps; for everyone else it is already made, and the time saved goes to the bullets, where it compounds.

Sending tips: 27 to 31

The last group exists because strong resumes lose at the finish line more often than anyone admits: the wrong file, the wrong name on it, the typo in the first line.

27. Name the file like a professional. Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, because final-v7-REAL.pdf is also information, and the filename is often the literal first thing a recruiter reads about you in their downloads folder, sitting alphabetized next to 40 competitors who mostly got this one right.

28. Check the email address itself. firstname.lastname beats anything you made in high school, and a free address takes 4 minutes to create if yours needs retiring. While there, make sure the account's display name is your name, since that is what appears in the recruiter's inbox line.

The last 10 minutes

Run the table as a literal checklist, in order, right before every send. It is 10 minutes against the failure modes that waste whole applications.

29. Read it backwards once. Bottom bullet to name, which unglues your eye from meaning and exposes typos your forward read has been sliding past for a week. Illinois' career center bakes this kind of pass into its resume checklist, and it is the single highest-yield 3 minutes on this list.

30. Audit the dates. Overlaps and gaps you cannot explain in one sentence will be asked about; better you find them first, with the calendar open, than improvise an answer live.

31. Open it on a phone before sending. Plenty of first reads happen there, and a layout that needs pinching on a 6-inch screen just failed its first interview. If the formatting keeps eating your writing time, the ranked and tested resume builders show which tools export a clean PDF free.

If you only do 5

Pressed for one evening: tip 1 (numbers in every bullet), tip 9 (one clean column), tip 18 (swap bullets per application), tip 22 (a 3-sentence summary with proof), tip 29 (the backwards read). Those 5 move interview rates; the other 26 protect the gains and cover the edge cases. Do them in that order, because each one raises the value of the next: clean bullets make the summary writable, and a tailored top third makes the proofread worth doing. And when a tip and the posting disagree, the posting wins: it is the only reader whose preferences are printed in front of you.