Lecture Notes: Crafting An Effective Resume

If you want to jump right to resume structure, click here → Building a Resume

Meet Danny

Danny Ortiz has sent out forty applications since January and hasn’t heard back from a single one.

He’s twenty-three. He finishes an associate degree in business management at Northwest Vista in May, and he works the host stand at a ramen place on Blanco Road, four nights a week. His coursework has run through operations, inventory, and scheduling, so those are the jobs he’s going after, mostly at distributors and clinics around town. He applies at night after his shift, two or three postings at a time, mostly off Indeed. Forty applications, no interviews, and no rejection emails either. His cousin told him the software was throwing his resume out before a person ever saw it.

THE WRONG DIAGNOSIS

His cousin is wrong, and the mistake has cost Danny about six weeks.

Nothing is throwing his resume out. It’s sitting in a database next to four hundred others, unopened. That’s a different problem and it has a different fix. We’ll follow Danny through the rest of these notes, because his resume does have real problems, but he is distracted by the rejection issue.

Applicant Tracking System Myths

An applicant tracking system is a database.

It stores applications, posts openings to LinkedIn and Indeed, tracks candidates through the interview stages, and lets a recruiter search what’s inside it. The T stands for tracking. Truth be told, it’s closer to a filing cabinet with a search box on the front than to anything with red glowing eyes, and saying you want to beat the ATS is a little like saying you want to beat Excel.

Myth: the ATS screened you out

You apply, nothing comes back, and you conclude that the ATS said no.

Actually, silence usually means nobody viewed your resume. Google takes in around three million applications a year and hires about two-tenths of one percent, and even small employers receive more applicants than they can review. Your resume didn’t lose a contest. It sat in a queue.

No hidden algorithm checks your resume against a list and discards you for a missing phrase. Recruiters open a job and see applicants stacked by date, and the search that exists works about as well as pressing Control-F. Those percentage match scores come from sites like Jobscan, which sell resume audits, so they invented a number and framed it as a wall you have to climb. Nobody on the hiring team ever sees it.

Myth: you can trick the ATS

Paste the job description at the bottom of your resume in white type, the story goes, and the machine reads it while the humans stay blind.

Here’s what happens instead. Everything gets extracted into plain text, “invisible” block included, and it lives in your application record from then on. A recruiter forwards your resume to a hiring manager, and there sits a wall of keywords, or perhaps the entire job posting. In that moment you stop being a candidate and start being a person who is trying to game the system.

Applicant Tracking System Truths

Some of what you hear about these systems is accurate.

Two claims hold up. One is about your file. The other is about the law, and it runs opposite to what many people think.

Truth: nothing rejects you, but your file can still fail

Your application lands in a pool, and a person decides what happens to it from there.

No system throws your resume away. What a system can do is fail to read it. Parsing really does break on complicated layouts, so a two-column design, a table, or a text box can drop half your page into nothing, and the recruiter opens a profile with your experience missing. Save as a PDF, keep your contact block in the body of the document, and the system should be able to read it.

Truth: the law limits automated rejection

You’ll hear that federal law forbids automated rejection and requires a human to read every resume. That’s close, but it isn’t how the rules work.

No federal statute bans automated screening outright. What federal law does is hold the employer responsible for what its tool produces, and the EEOC has said plainly that buying the software from a vendor doesn’t transfer the liability. The specific rulemaking has been state and local. New York City has required annual bias audits and applicant notice since 2023, and the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act took effect on January 1, 2026, reaching AI used in employment decisions. That exposure is real enough that companies keep people in the loop rather than hand the decision to software.

AN ASIDE: RESEARCH THE MARKET FIRST

Understanding what companies are looking for can help you craft a stronger resume.

Take some time to research companies you’d like to work for and the jobs they offer. Pull ten to fifteen live postings that sit in one job family, and read them next to each other. Mark terms and language that repeats. Danny pulled fifteen postings for operations and scheduling work at San Antonio distributors and clinics, and found scheduling in eleven, vendor coordination in nine, and inventory in seven. That list of terms helped him better understand what companies were looking for.

Timing matters too. Companies post to their own jobs page first, and the listing reaches Indeed days or weeks later, sometimes after the role has effectively been filled. Danny now checks eight local business job pages every morning, which took him twenty minutes to set up.

What Is a Resume?

A resume is a one-page summary of your school and work experience, and its job is to land you an interview.

That’s the whole assignment. I ran a resume service for a few years, and that sentence is the one I repeated most often. The resume doesn’t get you hired. It gets you twenty minutes with somebody who can hire you. Once you accept that, a lot of decisions get easier. You stop trying to fit your entire life on the page and start picking the four or five things that will make a hiring manager take a closer look.

A NOTE ON THE WORD ITSELF

People trace the resume back to Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote to the Duke of Milan in 1482 listing the war machines he could build.

The document we’d recognize today didn’t become common until the 1930s. You can spell it resume, résumé, or resumé. Dictionaries support all three, so pick one and stick with it.

Three Audiences

Your resume gets read three times, by three readers who are looking for different information.

1. THE SOFTWARE

Applicant tracking system software parses the info in your resume and places it fields in a system profile. It reads accessible text and pulls everything it finds.

2. HUMAN RESOURCES

Human Resources checks you against the posted requirements and confirms your paperwork is complete.

3. YOUR FUTURE MANAGER

Your future manager, the one who’ll typically sit across from you in the interview, reads for evidence that you’re a good fit for his or her team.

1	THE SOFTWARE

THE JOB: Build a file a machine can take apart cleanly.

The parser has to find your name, your phone number, your employers, and your dates, and drop each one into the right field. When it fails, a recruiter opens a profile with your address in the job title box and half your experience missing. She moves on to the next file, because yours looks like a mess and she has ninety more to review by day’s end.

How To Do It

Put your contact block at the top, in the body of the document. Name, city and state, phone, email, LinkedIn, and a portfolio link if your field expects one.
Use one column. Workday, the system you’ll meet applying to hospitals, school districts, and most large employers, can’t read past a single column. Two-column templates look sharp on your screen and land on hers as a scramble.
Cut tables, text boxes, graphics, clip art, and headshots. Those skill-rating dots next to Excel tell a machine nothing and a recruiter less. Say advanced in Excel and the whole problem goes away.
Pick a plain font and use one. Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman, at 12 point.
Keep headings, spacing, and bold consistent. Bold employers, titles, and dates. Other text should be unbolded. You may add periods on your bullets or no periods, as long as you do it consistently.
Save as a PDF unless the posting asks for something else.

Danny’s resume, problems one and two: a two-column Canva template with a headshot placeholder he never filled, and five skills rated in little circles. He rebuilt it in Word in about forty minutes, single column, Calibri throughout.

2	HUMAN RESOURCES

THE JOB: Show a screener you meet the posted qualifications at a glance.

HR reads to sort. A particular HR worker may have two hundred applications, a list of minimum and preferred qualifications, and she’s deciding which pile each applicant belongs in. For each resume, that decision takes a few seconds. Clearly place your qualifications in a place where she will see them and you’re more likely to land in the yes pile.

How To Do It

Make the minimum qualifications easy to find. These are the non-negotiables in the posting, and a resume that doesn’t demonstrate them gets set aside. Degree, years of experience, certification, software. Put them in the top third of the page, with your most recent job title obvious and white space around it. A dense block of gray text tells her this will be work, and she has two hundred more.
Feature the preferred qualifications too. Missing these won’t disqualify you, and having them visibly moves you up the stack when two candidates both clear the bar.
Write a summary only when necessary. Most recruiters skip it and go straight to experience. It earns its place when something needs explaining: a layoff, a relocation, a career change.
List the skills the posting named, with your level. Advanced in Excel, Salesforce CRM, Google Analytics, Toast POS. Leave off generic phrases like “good communicator” and “team player”, which are basic expectations and so don’t add value.
Place education by how recent it is. Institution, degree, relevant coursework, certifications with links. Within three years of graduating, put it above your experience with the date. Past three years, move it below and drop the dates.

Danny’s resume, problems three and four: a summary reading “hardworking team player with excellent communication skills,” and his education parked at the bottom with no date, though he graduates in May. To make his resume more focused, he rewrites the summary to point from restaurant work toward operations, and moves the education section up under his contact block, so his business management degree is one of the first things a reviewer will see.

3	YOUR FUTURE MANAGER

THE JOB: Give the person who’ll interview you evidence you’re a good fit.

Your future manager isn’t sorting. She’s looking at a short list, deciding who’s worth an hour of her Thursday, and she has one particular problem sitting on her desk this month. This is where most resumes fall apart, because they describe the job somebody was assigned instead of the work that person actually did.

THE C.A.R. METHOD

Every bullet under a job carries three things.

Circumstance is the project, problem, or team activity you were part of. Action is what you specifically did about it. Result is what changed, with a number on it wherever a number exists.

Most resumes give you the action alone, which reads as a job description. Add the circumstance and a manager understands why the work mattered. Add the result and she understands what you’re worth. Google teaches the same move as accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z, so pick whichever name you’ll remember.

How To Do It

Bridge the title gap before it costs you. Your title sits at the top of each job entry, and when it doesn’t translate, the reading can stop right there. Host (scheduling and vendor coordination, 12-person floor team) fixes it in six words.
Write your bullets as C.A.R. Three or four strong ones beat eight weak ones. Each line should leave her knowing that something changed because you were there.
Put numbers on the results. Percentages, dollars, minutes, headcount, volume. If you think you have no numbers, you haven’t looked. How many people, how many hours, how many covers on a Friday.
Aim at their current work. Your research gave you the things these postings keep asking for, so lead with the bullets that speak to those.
Let your choices signal fit. Which projects you took on and how you moved between roles say something about how you work with people, and she reads for that whether or not she mentions it.
Tailor to the posting. Read it beside your resume, mark what lines up, and work the posting’s own language into your achievements. Don’t say project management. Say led a cross-functional team of eight and delivered two weeks ahead of schedule.

Danny’s resume, problems five and six: six bullets of duties under his one job, and a title that read Host with nothing after it. Six bullets became three C.A.R. bullets, and the title picked up a parenthetical.

Building a Resume

Set the page up before you type a word, because changing it later reflows everything.

Margins. One inch on all four sides. That’s the Word default, so if you haven’t touched it, you’re already there.
Font. One font for the whole document. Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman at 12 point for your body text. Your name can run 16 to 20 point, and section headings a point or two above body size.
Spacing. Line spacing 1.0 or 1.15. Then open the Paragraph menu and set 0 points before and 6 points after, so bullets sit close together. Give section headings 12 points before and 4 after, which is what separates one block from the next.
Length. One page. If you’re over, cut bullets rather than shrinking the font below 10 point or squeezing the margins.

Stack the Blocks in Order

A resume is built from five or six standard blocks, in an order readers already expect.

Nobody is asking you to invent a format. A reader who opens your file is hunting for particular things in particular places, and your job is to put them where she’s already looking. Name each block in caps or bold, the same way every time. SKILLS in one place and Skills in another tells a reader you weren’t paying attention.

CONTACT	Name, city and state, phone, email, LinkedIn. In the body of the document, never in a header. No street address needed.
SUMMARY optional	Two or three lines, and only when something needs explaining: a career change, a relocation, a gap. Skip it otherwise and give the room to your bullets.
EDUCATION	Institution, degree, graduation date, relevant coursework. Sits here while you’re within three years of graduating. After that it moves below experience and the date comes off.
EXPERIENCE	Employer, title, location, dates, then three or four C.A.R. bullets. Most recent job first. This is the largest block on the page and it should look like it.
SKILLS	Named tools with your level. Two or three lines, not a column of icons.
EXTRAS optional	Certifications, languages, volunteer work, military service. Include these when they’re relevant, and cut them first when you’re over a page.

Write the Experience Bullets

Watch Danny turn three duty lines into one bullet a manager will stop on.

BEFORE

Greeted and seated guests in a timely manner
Managed the waitlist during busy shifts
Coordinated with kitchen and service staff to ensure smooth operations

All three are true, and all three are duties. They describe what Danny was assigned rather than what he did about it, so any host at any restaurant in Texas could have written them. There’s no circumstance, no action he took on his own, and no result. Three lines of prime page space, saying nothing.

So Danny picked the one thing he was proudest of and pulled it apart into the three C.A.R. pieces before writing anything.

CIRCUMSTANCE What was wrong?	Weekend dinner rushes were running 45-minute waits. Customers complained and some walked out.
ACTION What did you do?	Helped bring in a table management system with a digital waitlist, and rebuilt how the kitchen, servers, and front of house passed information.
RESULT What changed?	Waits dropped to 25 minutes. Nightly orders rose about 20%, from roughly 150 to 180.

Those three cells are still notes. The last move is to fold them into a single line, and the order stays the same as the name: circumstance, then action, then result. That’s why the method is easy to remember, and it puts the number at the end of the sentence, where it lands hardest.

AFTER

Faced with 45-minute weekend dinner waits, helped implement a digital waitlist and rebuilt kitchen-to-floor communication, cutting average waits to 25 minutes and raising nightly orders about 20%

One line replaced three. Danny did exactly the same job in both versions, and he didn’t invent anything. He went looking for the numbers, which took him an evening of checking old schedules and order counts, and that evening is most of the work. Do this twice more and the experience block is finished.

Before You Submit

Details put good candidates in the no pile, late in the process, after the hard work is finished.

So run the last check slowly. Click every link and confirm each one opens what you think it opens. Read your phone number out loud against the phone in your hand. Spell check, then proofread with your eyes, because spell check passes a correctly spelled wrong word. A hiring manager at Google once rejected a candidate over a single typo, saying the person didn’t pay attention to detail, and that was that.

Name the file like a professional. Ortiz_Danny_Resume.pdf. Danny sent forty employers a file called resume_final_v3.docx. Then confirm every requested document is attached, because HR won’t email you to ask.

Danny Gets an Interview

Danny stopped applying for two weeks in March, which felt to him like giving up.

He spent the first week reading fifteen postings side by side, until the repeats were obvious. Then he opened Word and started over, because there was no saving the Canva file. One column, Calibri, contact block at the top, education moved up with his May graduation date showing. His six duty bullets came down to three C.A.R. bullets, and the wait-time bullet took him an evening on its own, mostly spent digging up the numbers from before and after the new system.

Then he applied to nine jobs instead of forty, about ten minutes of tailoring each, since the research was already done. The first call came eleven days later, from a distribution company on the far West Side that needed somebody who could hold a schedule together when a truck runs late. Three interviews, two second rounds, one offer. He starts in June, two weeks after graduation, doing the scheduling and vendor work his degree pointed at. Nothing about the software changed between January and April.

Sources & Further Reading

Everything referenced above, if you want to go to the originals.

Farah Sharghi, “Beat the ATS” — assigned viewing, linked at the top of this page. The myth breakdown and the recruiter walkthrough of Lever come from here.
Farah Sharghi, “Ex-Google Recruiter Reveals How to Get FAANG Job Offers” — assigned viewing, linked in the middle of this page. Source of the section-by-section build.
Coalition for College, “What Is a Resume?” — the working definition used at the top of these notes.
Workable, “Die Hard: The Troubled History of the Resume” — da Vinci, the Duke of Milan, and how the document reached its modern shape.
Resume Genius, “How Do You Spell Resume?” — the case for all three spellings.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, guidance on adverse impact in software, algorithms, and AI used in employment selection — the federal framework, and the statement that vendors don’t absorb an employer’s liability.
NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Automated Employment Decision Tools FAQ (PDF) — how Local Law 144 works in practice, including the bias audit and applicant notice requirements.
Texas Legislature, House Bill 149, the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act — bill analysis for the Texas law that took effect January 1, 2026.