How to Make Your Resume Easy to Read and Hard to Ignore
Most resumes get only a quick skim, not a careful read. Eye-tracking studies show the first pass takes about seven seconds—so deliver your value fast and place it up front.
Readers also follow predictable scan patterns, often moving their eyes in an "F-pattern," starting at the top left, then scanning across and down in shorter horizontal lines. The Nielsen Norman Group coined this term to describe how people typically scan web pages and documents.
Your resume has two jobs: be easy for software to parse and easy for a human to skim. That means clean structure, plain headings, and short bullets that end with results. It also means not burying the lead.
Next, I’ll show you how to highlight your value in three lines, turn duties into one-line stories with outcomes, and link each job to business results—so your message is clear and concise.
Lead with Signal, Not Filler
The top block decides whether you make it past triage. In a few seconds, a hiring manager looks for three signals: you match the role, you’ve handled a comparable scope, and you’ve delivered a result recently. Make those three points unavoidable.
What to Include
- Role + scope. Name the target role and the scale or domain you’ve owned.
- Three aligned strengths. Use the employer’s language from the posting so the match is obvious.
- One proof. Pick a recent outcome in speed, quality, cost, revenue, or risk. One line, with a number or credible range.
What to Omit:
- Objectives, clichés, or “results-oriented team player.”
- Tool soup with no context.
- Photos, icons, columns, or tables that distract or break parsing.
- Irrelevant items at the top, like full street address, unrelated certs, or availability notes.
Putting it all together, we can craft a concise, but impactful opening line for your resume:
Engineering Manager for two product squads in billing and admin
Strengths: delivery flow, observability, coaching
In Q2, doubled deployment frequency and cut change failure rate from 24% to 12% by moving to trunk-based development with feature flags and adding SLO-driven alerting.
This works because it answers who you are for this job, the scale you’ve led, and what changed because of your leadership. It gives a hiring manager a reason to keep reading without making them hunt for it.
Turn Tasks into Proof
A duty list wastes the best real estate on your page. Convert each task into evidence of your impact. Here is how you can rethink your job highlights:
- Swap the vague verb for what you actually did.
- Name the areas you impacted (system, team, product).
- End with the effect, using a metric or credible proxy. The classic “X, measured by Y, by doing Z” structure keeps you honest.
When the impact is delivery or reliability, anchor on standard DevOps/DORA signals so a hiring manager knows exactly what the impact was: deploy frequency, change failure rate, lead time, and time to restore.
Here is what this looks like in practice:
Before: “Responsible for CI/CD for our services.”
After: “Rebuilt CI for the payments services with parallel stages and dependency caching; average build time dropped from 14m to 5m and the team shipped daily instead of twice a week.”
Why it works: one verb with teeth, a clear scope, and a result that maps to recognizable metrics (speed and deployment cadence). The example doesn't throw around tooling and keeps claims grounded in reality by providing data points and proof.
If you lack exact numbers
Use trustworthy proxies that still signal direction and scale: “reduced by a third,” “low five figures monthly,” “zero downtime,” “removed three manual steps,” “eliminated four weekly on-call pages.” Tie each proxy to a business angle (speed, quality, cost, revenue, or risk) so the reader doesn’t have to guess.
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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Tie your Work to Business Outcomes
What gets remembered in a resume isn’t the tool you used. It’s the change you created. Your job is to make that change obvious. Here are some typical areas to showcase the outcomes you have been able to achieve:
- Speed: Shipped faster or unblocked flow.
- Quality: Fewer defects/incidents, better reliability.
- Cost: Lower run costs or license spend.
- Revenue: Adoption, conversion, expansion, and accuracy in billing.
- Risk: Fewer audit gaps, safer releases, shorter recovery.
This mirrors how many teams evaluate impact and aligns with skills-first screening that looks for proof of outcomes. It is most helpful to see this in an example:
Platform Engineer, payments services
Cut monthly AWS cost by ~12% by right-sizing instances and storage tiers; preserved P95 latency and error budgets by adding load tests before each change.
This works because the first clause names the lever (cost) and magnitude; the second assures the reader that you protected performance and reliability. It’s a complete story in two commas.
Section Title
This won’t guarantee interviews. Hiring is messy, and each company screens differently. What this does is raise the signal in the places people actually see.
Use it as an edit pass. Clarify your lead so a reader can spot the role you fit, the scope you’ve handled, and the result you own. Rewrite a handful of bullets so each ends with an outcome. Add one line per role that names the business lever you moved. Stop when every line earns its spot.
Expect tradeoffs. Senior folks can use two pages if they stay tight. If numbers are sensitive, use credible ranges or operational proof. If your path is nonlinear, anchor the lead to the problems you can solve next.
Want a quick sanity check? Reply to this email with your resume, and I’ll send back specific edits.