Draft written by Claude from your background — replace with your own view before publishing.
On a first pass, a resume gets somewhere between six and thirty seconds. Whoever is reading is not evaluating you. They are looking for a reason to move you to the smaller pile, and failing that, a reason to stop.
Task bullets are invisible
The most common line on a strong candidate’s resume describes what they were assigned: managed vendor relationships across three regions. It tells the reader nothing, because everyone at that level managed something.
The version that survives says what changed because you were the one doing it. Not the responsibility, the consequence. This is not about inventing metrics — plenty of good work has no clean number attached — but every bullet should answer “and therefore what.”
Seniority is shown by scope, not adjectives
Words like strategic, cross-functional and end-to-end are load-bearing on most resumes and carry nothing. What actually signals seniority is scope: how many people, how much money, whose decision it changed, and whether you owned the outcome or contributed to it.
Replace the adjective with the scope and the line does twice the work in fewer characters.
Your resume and your LinkedIn are different documents
A resume is read by someone deciding whether to interview you against a specific role. LinkedIn is read by someone deciding whether to start a conversation at all, often with no role in mind. Most people paste one into the other, which produces a LinkedIn that reads like an application and a resume that reads like a profile.
LinkedIn should carry the narrative — why this sequence of roles makes sense and where it is going. The resume should carry the evidence.
Cut before you add
Almost every resume I review gets shorter. The instinct when applying is to include more, on the theory that something will land. The effect is to dilute the three lines that would have landed on their own.
If you are working through this yourself,book a 30-minute call.