Where do recruiters look first?
In an eye-tracking study by Ladders, recruiters spent about 7.4 seconds on a first pass and read the same spots in roughly the same order:
- Your name
- Current title and company
- Current start and end dates
- Previous title and company
- Previous dates
- Education
If those spots don’t make the case, the bullets below rarely get read. The study didn’t publish its sample size, so treat the numbers as directional.
What layout works for both parsers and people?
- One column, top to bottom, with standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills.
- Body text 10–12 pt; name 16–20 pt. Safe fonts: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, or free faces like Inter and Source Sans 3.
- Contact details in the body, not the page header.
- One page under about 10 years of experience; two at most.
- A text-based PDF named First-Last-Role.pdf.
How do you write a bullet that shows impact?
Google’s former head of people, Laszlo Bock, popularized a simple shape: accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z.
- Before: “Responsible for the onboarding flow.”
- After: “Raised activation 18% for 40k new teams a month by redesigning onboarding around the first board.”
No number? Use scope: team size, users, budget, countries or frequency.
What should you cut?
- Objectives (“seeking a challenging role”). Use a 2–3 line summary for this job instead.
- Filler: “responsible for”, “helped with”, “team player”, “hard-working”.
- Skill bars and star ratings; name the skill and prove it in a bullet.
- Photos, age and marital status, unless the local norm expects them.