Who reads it, and how
Two readers stand between you and an interview. The first is often software: most mid-size and large employers run applications through an applicant tracking system, which parses your file into fields and lets a recruiter search by keyword. The second is a person who gives the first pass a matter of seconds, scanning your job titles, the employer names and the dates. Both reward a plain, conventional page with the facts where they are expected.
The layout that survives
Use one column, a standard font at ten to twelve points, and margins of at least half an inch. Tables, text boxes, graphics, skill bars and two-column templates are the usual casualties of parsing software, and a header or footer can hide your phone number from it entirely. Use ordinary section labels: Experience, Education, Skills. List jobs in reverse chronological order with title, employer, city, and the month and year you started and left. A photo, a full street address and the line "references available on request" all waste space. City and state, a phone number and a sober email address are enough.
Bullets that carry weight
Each job gets three to five bullets, and each bullet starts with a verb and ends with a result. "Responsible for social media accounts" describes a chair you sat in. "Grew the newsletter list from 1,200 to 4,000 subscribers in eight months" describes what you did. Where you have no dollar figure, count something else: tickets closed per week, people trained, hours saved, the size of the budget. Service jobs count. A server who ran a twelve-table section and trained four new hires has shown speed and reliability, which is what an entry-level employer is buying.
Tailoring without rewriting
Keep a long master document of every bullet you have ever written, and cut from it for each application. Mark the skills and tools the posting names more than once, and use the employer's exact wording wherever it is true of you. If they say "accounts payable," do not write "AP." Pasting keywords in white text is an old trick that parsing software exposes and recruiters hold against you. Move education below experience once you have a year or two of work, and drop the GPA unless it is above about 3.5 or the posting asks for it.
Tip Paste the finished resume into a plain text editor. If it reads in the right order with nothing missing, tracking software will read it correctly too.
