Resumetricx — see which sections of your CV were actually read

You have been told to tailor your CV. This is the part where somebody tells you to what.

A recruiter gives your CV one pass. Some sections hold them, some are skimmed, some are never reached at all. These guides are about writing for that pass — what belongs at the top, what earns its space further down, and what a parser does to the whole thing before a person ever sees it.

The guidance is on this page, in full. No article to click through to, nothing behind an email address, and no part two.

Attention lands in two or three places and skips the rest.

Not a page read top to bottom. A few sections hold a reader, one or two get a glance, and the bottom of the page is often never reached. Every recommendation further down is aimed at that shape.

One pass, section by section

Thirty-eight seconds on the current role, four on Education, and a second or less on everything below it. That is what a single pass looks like when something measures it, and it is why “move it up” is a different instruction from “write it better”.

Example report, not a measurementSkipped → held

Two things read your CV, and the first one is not a person.

In the order it happens: a parser takes the document apart, a recruiter decides in the first few lines whether to keep going, and then every bullet has to earn the line after it.

First

Get past the parser and in front of a person

What an applicant tracking system does to your CV before anyone sees it, and the formatting choices that quietly break it.

Then

The mistakes that end a read before it starts

The habits that make a recruiter stop early — and what to write instead in each case.

Line by line

How to write a bullet point somebody finishes

Sentence-level craft: verbs, evidence, ordering and length. The small decisions that decide whether a section gets read to the end.

The evidence that counts is different in every job. The mistake is the same one.

Listing the activity instead of the result. Below is what counts as evidence in each of these jobs, and how to put it on the page so a hiring manager can use it.

Writing a CV as a software engineer

Where to put the stack, how to describe a project so it reads as engineering rather than a list, and what to cut once you have more than one job to show.

Writing a CV as a product manager

The hardest CV to write, because the work is other people shipping. How to show judgement, scope and the decisions you actually owned.

Writing a CV as a marketing manager

How to write up a campaign so the result is the sentence, not the activity, and where budget and team size belong.

Writing a CV as a sales representative

Quota, attainment and deal size are your evidence. How to present them so a hiring manager can compare you against the last person they read.

Writing a CV as a data scientist

Methods and tooling are the easy part. How to write up a piece of analysis so that the decision it changed is the thing on the page.

Advice about ordering is easier to follow when you can see it applied. The examples are written CVs, one per role — the phrasing and the section order the advice is describing, set out in full so you can take what you need.

See how the advice reads on a finished CV

Advice is a hunch until something measures the result.

Everything on this page is a recommendation about what a recruiter will read. Build your CV in Resumetricx and send a link instead of a file, and you stop guessing: you see which sections were read, which were re-read, and where the reading stopped. You cannot find that out later about a CV you have already sent.

No card required. The first CV is free — and measurement, which is what the reports above describe, starts on Professional.