What makes a résumé work?
A strong résumé helps the reader understand your career story, context, scope, results and value proposition. Not everything that matters comes with a number — but it should come with a result. Tailor the emphasis to the opportunity without losing the truth of your experience.
For candidates
Your résumé is a marketing document, not a job history
A hiring committee is not reading to understand your past. They are reading to predict your next twelve months. Every line should answer 'why should we hire you for this job' rather than 'what were you responsible for'.
One résumé per posting
Strong candidates keep several variations, each tailored to a specific employer and role. The reordering matters more than the rewriting: put the experience that maps to the posting in the first third of page one.
What to make clear throughout
- Scope: portfolio size, budget, headcount, asset class, geography.
- Decision: what you personally owned, not what your team was near.
- Result: quantitative or qualitative evidence of what changed because of your work.
- Context: why the outcome was difficult, in one clause.
Two pages is not a rule
Length follows relevance, context and the complexity of the career story. Use the space needed to make scope, progression and results clear, and remove detail that does not help the reader understand your fit for the opportunity.
The parts candidates most often get wrong
- Adjectives with no evidence behind them — 'strategic', 'results-driven', 'dynamic'.
- Unexplained gaps or short tenures left for the committee to interpret.
- A summary paragraph written for no particular role.
- Formatting that machine screening cannot parse cleanly.